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THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. 



THE 



ESSAYS OF ELI A. 



B¥ 



CHARLES LAMB. 



2i fteto £3ifioj). 



WILLIS P. HAZARD, 178 CHESTNUT ST., 

PHILADELPHIA. 

1854. 



*S4 



Kite & Walton, 
Printers. 



PREFACE. 

BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA. 



This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been 
in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to 
nature. 

To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humor of 
the thing, if there ever was much in it, was pretty well 
exhausted ; and a two years' and a half existence has been 
a tolerable duration for a phantom. 

I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have 
heard objected to my late friend's writings was well-found- 
ed. Crude they are, I grant you — a sort of unlicked, incon- 
dite things — villainously pranked in an affected array of 
antique modes and phrases. They had not been hi s, if they 
had been other than such ; and better it is, that a writer 
should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect 
a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him. 
Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did 
not know, that what he tells us, as of himself, was often 
true only (historically) of another ; as in a former Essay 
(to save many instances) — where under the first person (his 
favorite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a 
country-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends 
and connexions — in direct opposition to his own early his- 
tory. If it be egotism to imply and twine with his own 
identity the griefs and affections of another — making him- 
self many, or reducing many unto himself — then is the skil- 
ful novelist, who all along brings in his hero or heroine, 
speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all ; who 



vi PREFACE. 

yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. 
And how shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, 
who doubtless, under cover of passion uttered by another, 
oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most inward feelings, 
and expresses his own story modestly ? 

My late friend was in many respects a singular charac- 
ter. Those who did not like him, hated him ; and some, 
who once liked him, afterwards became his bitterest haters. 
The truth is, he gave himself too little concern what he 
uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither time 
nor place, and would e'en out with what came uppermost. 
With the severe religionist he would pass for a free-thinker ; 
while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or per- 
suaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few un- 
derstood him ; and I am not certain that at all times he 
quite understood himself. He too much affected that dan- 
gerous figure — irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, and 
reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. He would interrupt the 
gravest discussion with some light jest ; and yet, perhaps, 
not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it. Your 
long and much talkers hated him. The informal habits of 
his mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of speech, 
forbade him to be an orator ; and he seemed determined 
that no one else should play that part when he w^as present. 
He was petit and ordinary in his person and appearance. 
I have seen him sometimes in what is called good company, 
but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be sus- 
pected for an odd fellow ; till some unlucky occasion pro- 
voking it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not 
altogether senseless, perhaps, if rightly taken), which has 
stamped his character for the evening. It was hit or miss 
with him ; but nine times out of ten, he contrived by this 
device to send away a whole company his enemies. 
His conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his 
happiest impromptus had the appearance of effort. He has 
been accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was 



PREFACE. vii 

but struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He 
chose his companions for some individuality of character 
which they manifested. Hence, not many persons of science, 
and few professed literati, were of his councils. They were, 
for the most part, persons of an uncertain fortune ; and, as 
to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious than a 
gentleman of settled (though moderate), income, he passed 
with most of them for a great miser. To my knowledge this 
was a mistake. His intimados, to confess a truth, were in the 
world's eye a ragged regiment. He found them floating on 
the surface of society ; and the color, or something else, in 
the weed pleased him. The burrs stuck to him — but they 
were good and loving burrs for all that. He never greatly 
cared for the society of what are called good people. If 
any of these were scandalized (and offences were sure to 
arise), he could not help it. When he has been remon- 
strated with for not making more concessions to the feelings 
of good people, he^would retort by asking, what one point 
did these good people ever concede to him ? He was tem- 
perate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little 
on this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the In- 
dian weed he might be thought a little excessive. He took 
it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry — as the 
friendly vapor ascended, how his prattle would curl up 
sometimes with it ! the ligaments which tongue-tied him, 
were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist ! 

I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that 
my old friend is departed. His jests were beginning to 
grow obsolete, and his stories to be found out. He felt the 
approaches of age ; and while he pretended to cling to life, 
you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him. Dis- 
coursing with him latterly on this subject, he expressed 
himself with a pettishness, which I thought unworthy of 
him. In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he called 
it) at Shacklewell, some children belonging to a school of 
industry had met us, and bowed and curtseyed, as he 



viii PREFACE. 

thought, in an especial manner to him. " They take me 
for a visiting governor," he muttered earnestly. He had a 
horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like any- 
thing important and parochial. He thought that he ap- 
proached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general 
aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable 
character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age 
that should so entitle him. He herded always, while it was 
possible, with people younger than himself. He did not 
conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in 
the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He 
was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate 
gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of infancy 
had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of 
manhood. These were weaknesses ; but such as they 
were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The South-Sea House I 

Oxford in the Vacation 9 

Christ's Hospital, Five-and-Thirty Years Ago 15 

The Two Races of Men 28 

New- Year's Eve 34 

Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist 41 

A Chapter on Ears 43 

All Fools' Day 53 

A Quakers' Meeting 57 

The Old and the New Schoolmaster B 52 

Imperfect Sympathies 7L 

Witches, and Other Night Fears SO 

Valentine's Day # # # # §7 

My Relations 91 

Mackery End, in Hertfordshire gg 

My First Play jQg 

Modern Gallantry 2Q^ 

The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple 113 

Grace Before Meat 12 4 

Dream-Children ; a Reverie 131 

Distant Correspondents 135 

The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers 141 

A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis. . 148 

A Dissertation upon Roast Pig 155 

A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behavior of Married People 164 

On Some of the Old Actors 171 

On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century 1S3 

On the Acting of Munden 19! 



x CONTENTS. 

"• PAGE 

Blakesmooe in H SHIRE 193 

Poor Relations 199 

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading 206 

Stage Illusion 213 

To the Shade of Elliston 217 

Ellistoniana 220 

The Old Margate Hot 226 

The Convalescent 234 

Sanity of True Genius 239 

Captain Jackson 243 

The Superannuated Man 248 

The Genteel Style in "Writing 256 

Barbara S 261 

The Tombs in the Abbey 267 

Amicus Redivivus 270 

Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney 275 

Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago 284 

Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of 

Modern Art 292 

The Wedding 303 

Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age 309 

Confessions of a Drunkard 315 

Old China 324 

The Child Angel ; a Dream 330 

Popular Fallacies 

I. That a Bully is always a Coward 333 

II. That ill-gotten gain never prospers 334 

III. That a man must not laugh at his own jest ib. 

IV. That such a One shows his Breeding. — That it is easy to 

PERCEIVE HE IS NO GENTLEMAN 335 

V. That the Poor copy the Vices of the Rich 336 

VI. That Enough is as good as a Feast 337 

VII. Of two Disputants the warmest is generally in the wrong. . 338 
VIII. That Verbal Allusions are not Wit, because they will not 339 

bear Translation 

IX. That the Worst Puns are the Best 340 

X. That Handsome is that Handsome does 342 

XI That we must not look a Gift-Horse in the Mouth 345 

XII. That Home is Home though it is never so Homely 347 

XIII. That you must love me, and love my Dog 351 

XIV. That we should rise with the Lark 354 

XV. That we should lie down with the Lamb 356 

XVI. That a sulky temper is a misfortune 358 



E LI A. 



THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. 

Reader, in thy passage from the Bank — where thou hast been 
receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean an- 
nuitant like myself) — to the Flower Pot, to secure a place ibr 
Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat 
northerly, — didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, hand- 
some, brick and stone edifice, to the left — where Threadneedle- 
street abuts upon Bishopsgate ? I dare say thou hast often ad- 
mired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to 
view a grave court, with cloisters, and pillars, with few or no 
traces of goers-iri or comers-out — a desolation something like 
Balclutha's.* 

This was once a house of trade, — a centre of busy interests. 
The throng of merchants was here — the quick pulse of gain — 
and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the 
soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticos; 
imposing staircases, offices roomy as the state apartments in pal- 
aces — deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks ; 
the still more sacred interiors of court and committee-rooms, with 
venerable faces of beadles, door-keepers — directors seated in form 
on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend), at long worm-eaten 
tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather cov- 
erings, supporting massy silver inkstands long since dry ; — the 
oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and 
sub-governors, of queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the 
Brunswick dynasty : — huge charts, which subsequent discoveries 

* I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate. — Osman* 

2 



2 ELIA. 

have antiquated ; dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, — and 
soundings of the Bay of Panama ! The long passages hung with 
buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might 
defy any, short of the last conflagration : — with vast ranges of 
cellerage under all, where dollars and pieces-of-eight once lay, 
an " unsunned heap," for Mammon to have solaced his solitary 
heart withal, — long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the 
blast of the breaking of that famous Bubble. 

Such is the South-Sea House. At least, such it was forty 
years ago, when I knew it, — a magnificent relic ! What altera- 
tions may have been made in it since, I have had no opportunities 
of verifying. Time, I take for granted, has not freshened it. 
No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping waters. A 
thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The moths, that 
were then battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have 
rested from their depredations, but other light generations have 
succeeded, making fine fret-work among their single and double 
entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a superfoetation of 
dirt !) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, save 
by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore the 
mode of book-keeping in Queen Anne's reign \ or, with less hal- 
lowed curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mysteries of that 
tremendous hoax, whose extent the petty peculators of our day 
look back upon with the same expression of incredulous admira- 
tion, and hopeless ambition of rivalry, as would become the puny 
face of modern conspiracy contemplating the Titan size of 
Vaux's superhuman plot. 

Peace to the manes of the Bubble ! Silence and destitution 
are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial ! 

Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living 
commerce, — amid the fret and fever of speculation — with the 
Bank, and the 'Change, and the India-house about thee, in the 
hey-day of present prosperity, with their important faces, as it 
were, insulting thee, their poor neighbour out of business — to the 
idle and merely contemplative, — to such as me, old house ! there 
is a charm in thy quiet : — a cessation — a coolness from business 
— an indolence almost cloistral — which is delightful ! With what 
reverence ha\e I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at even- 



THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. 3 

tide ! They spoke of the past : — the shade of some dead ac- 
countant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in 
life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. I have no 
skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three 
degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their en- 
shrining shelves — with their old fantastic flourishes, and decora- 
tive rubric interlacings — their sums in triple columniations, set 
down with formal superfluity of ciphers — with pious sentences at 
the beginning, without which our religious ancestors never ven- 
tured to open a book of business, or bill of lading — the costly 
vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are 
got into some better library r , — are very agreeable and edifying 
spectacles. I can look upon these defunct dragons with compla- 
cency. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled pen-knives (our 
ancestors had everything on a larger scale than we have hearts 
for) are as good as anything from Herculaneum. The pounce- 
boxes of our days have gone retrograde. 

The very clerks which I remember in the South-Sea House — 
I speak of forty years back — had an air very different from those 
in the public offices that I have had to do with since. They par- 
took of the genius of the place ! 

They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of su- 
perfluous salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they had not much 
to do) persons of a curious and speculative turn of mind. Old- 
fashioned, for a reason mentioned before. Humourists, for they 
were of all descriptions ; and, not having been brought together 
in early life (which has a tendency to assimilate the members of 
corporate bodies to each other), but, for the most part, placed in 
this house in ripe or middle age, they necessarily carried into it 
their separate habits and oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, 
as into a common stock. Hence they formed a sort of Noah's 
ark. Odd fishes. A lay-monastery. Domestic retainers in a 
great house, kept more for show than use. Yet pleasant fellows, 
full of chat — and not a few among them had arrived at consider- 
able proficiency on the German flute. 

The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Bnton. He 
had something of the choleric complexion of his countrymen 
stamped on his visage, but was a worthy sensible man at bottom. 



4 ELIA. 

He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed out in the 
fashion which I remember to have seen in caricatures of what 
were termed, in my young days, Maccaronies. He was the last 
of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a gib-cat over his counter 
all the forenoon, I think I see him, making up his cash (as they 
call it) with tremulous fingers, as if he feared every one about 
him was a defaulter ; in his hypochondry ready to imagine him- 
self one ; haunted, at least, with the idea of the possibility of his 
becoming one ; his tristful visage clearing up a little over his 
roast neck of veal at Anderton's at two (where his picture still 
hangs, taken a little before his death by desire of the master of 
the coffee-house, which he had frequented for the last five-and- 
twenty years), but not attaining the meridian of its animation till 
evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The simulta- 
neous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of 
the clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in 
the families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his 
presence. Then was his forte, his glorified hour ! How would 
he chirp, and expand, over a muffin ! How would he dilate into 
secret history ! His countryman, Pennant himself, in particular, 
could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new 
London — the site of old theatres, churches, streets gone to 
decay — where Rosamond's Pond stood — the Mulberry-gardens 
— and the Conduit in Cheap — with many a pleasant anecdote, 
derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which 
Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of Noon, — the worthy 
descendants of those heroic confessors, who, flying to this country, 
from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept 
alive the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscurities of 
Hog-lane, and the vicinity of the Seven Dials ! 

Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the air 
and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him for one, 
had you met him in one of the passages leading to Westminster- 
hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body forwards, 
which, in great men, must be supposed to be the effect of an ha- 
bitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors. 
While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in 
the colloquy. The conference over, you were at leisure to smile 



THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. 5 

at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had 
just awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It 
did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its origi- 
nal state of white paper. A sucking-babe might have posed him. 
What was it then ? Was he rich ? Alas, no ! Thomas Tame 
was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentle- 
folks, when I fear all was not well at all times within. She had 
a neat meagre person, which it was evident she had not sinned in 
over-pampering ; but in its veins was noble blood. She traced 
her descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never 
thoroughly understood, — much less can explain wi h any heraldic 
certainty at this time of day, — to the illustrious, but unfortunate 
house of Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. 
This was the thought — the sentiment — the bright solitary star of 
your lives, — ye mild and happy pair, — which cheered you in the 
night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station ! This 
was to you instead^ of riches, instead of rank, instead of glitter- 
ing attainments : and it was worth them altogether. You insult- 
ed none with it ; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive 
armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. 
Decus et solamen. 

Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp. 
He neither pretended to high blood, nor, in good truth, cared one 
fig about the matter. He " thought an accountant the greatest 
character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in 
it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved 
his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to 
the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abom- 
inably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle-street, 
which, without anything very substantial appended to them, were 
enough to enlarge a man's notions of himself that lived in them, 
(I know not who is the occupier of them now,) resounded fort- 
nightly to the notes of a concert of " sweet breasts," as our an- 
cestors would have called them, culled from club-rooms and or- 
chestras — chorus singers — first and second violoncellos — double 
basses — and clarionets — who ate his coid mutton, and drank his 
punch, and praised his ear. He sate like Lord Midas among 
them. But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature. 



6 ELIA. 

Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were banished. 
You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke. Pol- 
itics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and 
abstracted. The whole duty of man consisted in writing off div- 
idend warrants. The striking of the annual balance in the com- 
pany's books (which, perhaps, differed from the balance of lasl 
year in the sum of 25/. Is. 6d.) occupied his days and nights foi 
a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of 
things (as they call them in the city) in his beloved house, or did 
not sigh for a return of the old stirring days when South Sea 
hopes were young — (he was indeed equal to the wielding of any 
the most intricate accounts of the most flourishing company in 
these or those days) : — but to a genuine accountant the difference 
of proceeds is as nothing. The fractional farthing is as dear to 
his heart as the thousands which stand before it. He is the true 
actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it 
with like intensity. With Tipp form was everything. His life 
was formal. His actions seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen 
was not less erring than his heart. He made the best executor 
in the world ; he was plagued with incessant executorships ac- 
cordingly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in 
equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little or- 
phans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp 
of the dying hand, that commended their interests to his protec- 
tion. With all this there was about him a sort of timidity — (his 
few enemies used to give it a worse name) — a something •which, 
in reverence to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on 
this side of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to 
endow John Tipp with a sufficient measure of the principle of 
self-preservation. There is a cowardice which we do not de- 
spise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in its elements ; 
it betrays itself, not you : it is mere temperament ; the absence 
of the romantic and the enterprising ; it sees a lion in the way, 
and will not, with Fortinbras, " greatly find quarrel in a straw/' 
when some supposed honour is at stake. Tipp never mounted 
the box of a stage-coach in his life ; or leaned against the rails 
of a balcony ; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet ; or looked 
down a precipice ; or let off a gun ; or went upon a water-party ; 



THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. 7 

or would willingly let you go, if he could have helped it : neither 
was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever 
forsook friend or principle. 

Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom 
common qualities become uncommon ? Can I forget thee, Henry 
Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, the author, of the South 
Sea House ? who never enteredst thy office in a morning, or quit- 
tedst it in mid-day — (what didst thou in an office ?) — without 
some" quirk that left a sting ! Thy gibes and thy jokes are now 
extinct, or survive but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the 
good fortune to rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three days 
ago, and found thee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy 
wit is a little gone by in these fastidious days — thy topics are 
staled by the " new-born gauds " of the time : — but great thou 
used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, 
and Shelburne, and Rockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, and 
Clinton, and the war which ended in the tearing from Great Brit- 
ain her rebellious colonies, — and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Saw- 
bridge, and Bull, and Dunning, and Pratt, and Richmond, — and 
such small politics. 

A little less facetious, and a great deal more obstreperous, was 
fine rattling, rattle-headed Plumer. He was descended, — not in 
a right line, reader, (for his lineal pretensions, like his personal, 
favoured a little of the sinister bend,) from the Plumers of Hert- 
fordshire. So tradition gave him out ; and certainly family fea- 
tures not a little sanctioned the opinion. Certainly old Walter 
Plumer (his reputed author) had been a rake in his days, and 
visited much in Italy, and had seen the world. He was uncle, 
bachelor-uncle to the fine old whig still living, who has represent- 
ed the county in so many successive parliaments, and has a fine 
old mansion near Ware. Walter flourished in George the Sec- 
ond's days, and was the same who was summoned before the 
House of Commons about a business of franks, with the old Du- 
chess of Marlborough. You may read of it in Johnson's Life of 
Cave. Cave came off cleverly in that business. It is certain 
our Plumer did nothing to discountenance the rumour. He rather 
seemed pleased whenever it was, with all gentleness, insinuated. 



8 ELIA. 

But, besides his family pretensions, Plumer was an engaging fel- 
low, and sang gloriously. 

Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sangest, mild, child-like, 
pastoral M — — ; a flute's breathing less divinely whispering than 
thy Arcadian melodies, when, in tones worthy of Arden, thou 
didst chant that song sung by Amiens to the banished Duke, 
which proclaims the winter wind more lenient than for a man to 
be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly M , the unapproach- 
able church- warden of Bishopsgate. He knew not what he did, 
when he begat thee, like spring, gentle offspring of blustering 
winter : — only unfortunate in thy ending, which should have been 
mild, conciliatory, swan-like. 

Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, but 
they must be mine in private : — already have I fooled the readei 
to the top of his bent ; — else could I omit that strange creature 
Woollett, who existed in trying the question, and bought litiga- 
tions ? — and still stranger, inimitable, solemn Hep worth, from 
whose gravity Newton might have deduced the law of gravita- 
tion. How profoundly would he nib a pen — with what delibera- 
tion would he wet a wafer ! 

But it is time to close — night's wheels are rattling fast over 
me — it is proper to have done with this solemn mockery. 

Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while ? 
— peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up be- 
fore thee, are fantastic — insubstantial — like Henry Pimpernel, 
and old John Naps of Greece : 

Be satisfied that something answering to them nas had a being. 
Their importance is from the past. 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 



Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article — as 
the wary connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye, (which, while it 
reads, seems as though it read not,) never fails to consult the quis 
sculpsit in the corner, before he pronounces some rare piece to be 
a Vivares, or a Woollet methinks I hear you exclaim, Read- 
er, Who is Elia ? 

Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-forgot- 
ten humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of busi- 
ness, long since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me 

down in your mind as one of the self-same college a votary 

of the desk — a notched and cropt scrivener — one that sucks his 
sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill. 

Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is 
my humour, my fancy — in the fore-part of the day, when the 
mind of your man of letters requires some relaxation — (and none 
better than such as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his 
beloved studies) — to while away some good hours of my time in the 
contemplation of indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered 
or otherwise. In the first place ****** 
and then it sends you home with such increased appetite to your 
books * * * . * n0 f t0 gay^ t ^ at V0lir outside 
sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most 
kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays 
— so that the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, 
the settings up of an author. The enfranchised quill, that has 
plodded all the morning among the cart-rucks of figures and ci- 
phers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over the flowery carpet- 
ground of a midnight dissertation. — It feels its promotion. 
* * * * * go that you see, upon the whole, the 



10 ELIA. 

literary dignity of Ella is very little, if at all, compromised in 
the condescension. 

Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities inci- 
dental to the life of a public office, I would be thought blind to 
certain flaws, which a cunning carper might be able to pick in 
this Joseph's vest. And here I must have leave, in the fulness of 
my soul, to regret the abolition, and doing-away-with altogether, 
of those consolatory interstices, and sprinklings of freedom, 
through the four seasons, — the red-letter days, now become, to all 
intents and purposes, dead-letter days. There was Paul, and 
Stephen, and Barnabas — 

Andrew and John, men famous in old times, 

— we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as 1 
was at school at Christ's- I remember their effigies, by the same 
token, in the old Basket Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his 
uneasy posture holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act of flay- 
ing, after the famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti. 1 honoured 

them all, and could almost have wept the defalcation of Iscariot 
— so much did we love to keep holy memories sacred : — only me 
thought I a little grudged at the coalition of the better Jude with 
Simon — clubbing (as it were) their sanctities together, to make 
up one poor gaudy-day between them — as an economy unworthy 
of the dispensation. 

These were brighj visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's life — 
" far off their coming shone." — I was as good as an almanac in 
those days. I could have told you such a saint's-day falls out 
next week, or the week after. Peradventure the Epiphany, by 
some periodical infelicity, would, once in six years, merge in a 
Sabbath. Now am I little better than one of the profane. Let 
me not be thought to arraign the wisdom of my civil superiors, 
who have judged the further observation of these holy tides to be 
papistical, superstitious. Only in a custom of such long stand- 
ing, methinks, if their Holinesses the Bishops had, in decency, been 

first sounded but I am wading out of my depths. I am not 

the man to decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority 
—I am plain Elia — no Selden, nor Archbishop Usher — though 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 11 

at present in the thick of their books, here in the heart of learn- 
ing, under the shadow of the mighty Bodley. 

I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such a 
one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of the 
sweet food of academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to 
while away a few idle weeks at, as one or other of the Universi- 
ties. Their vacation too, at this time of the year, falls in so pal 
with ours. Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy 
myself of what degree or standing I please. I seem admitted ad 
eundem. I fetch up past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel- 
bell, and dream that it rings for me. In moods of humility I can 
be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock vein rises, I strut 
a Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, I proceed Master 
of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that respecta- 
ble character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed- 
makers in spectacles, drop a bow or a curtsy, as I pass, wisely 
mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about in black, 
which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quad- 
rangle, I can be content to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic 
Doctor. 

The walks at these times are so much one's own, — the tall 
trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen ! The halls deserted, 
and with open doors inviting one to slip in unperceived, and pay 
a devoir to some Founder, or noble or royal Benefactress (that 
should have been ours), whose portrait seems to smile upon their 
over-looked beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. Then, 
to take a peep in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, 
redolent of antique hospitality : the immense caves of kitchens, 
kitchen fire-places, cordial recesses ; ovens whose first pies were 
baked four centuries ago ; and spits which have cooked for Chau- 
cer ! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed 
to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth a Man- 
ciple. 

Antiquity ! thou wondrous charm, what art thou ? that, being 
nothing, art everything ! When thou wert, thou wert not anti- 
quity — then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as 
thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration ; thou thy- 
self being to thyself flat, jejune, modern I What mystery lurks 



12 ELIA. 

in this retroversion ? or what half Januses* are we, that cannot 
look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever re- 
vert ! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything ! the 
past is everything, being nothing ! 

What were thy dark ages ? Surely the sun rose as brightly 
then as now, and man got him to his work in the morning. Why 
is it we can never hear mention of them without an accompany- 
ing feeling, as though a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of 
things, and that our ancestors wandered to and fro groping ! 

Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do most arride and 
solace me, are thy repositories of mouldering learning, thy 
shelves 

What a place to be in is an old library ! It seems as though 
all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours 
to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or 
middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, 
their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem 
to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage ; and the odour of 
their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of 
those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. 

Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of MSS. 
Those vari<2 lectiones, so tempting to the more erudite palates, do 
but disturb and unsettle my faith. I am no Herculanean raker. 
The credit of the three witnesses might have slept unimpeached 
for me. I leave these curiosities to Porson, and to G. D. — whom, 
by the way, I found busy as a moth over some rotten archive, 
rummaged out of some seldom-explored press, in a nook at Oriel. 
With long poring, he is grown almost into a book. He stood as 
passive as one by the side of the old shelves. I longed to new- 
coat him in russia, and assign him his place. He might have 
mustered for a tall Scapula. 

D. is assiduous in his visits to these seats of learning. No in- 
considerable portion of his moderate fortune, I apprehend, is con- 
sumed in journeys between them and Clifford's- inn where, 

like a dove on the asp's nest, he has long taken up his uncon- 
scious abode, amid an incongruous assembly of attorneys, attor- 

* Januses of one face. — Sir Thomas Brown. 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 13 

Beys' clerks, apparitors, promoters, vermin of the law, among 
whom he sits " in calm and sinless peace. " The fangs of the 
law pierce him not — the winds of litigation blow over his humble 
chambers — the hard sheriff's officer moves his hat as he passes — 
legal nor illegal discourtesy touches him — none thinks of offering 
violence or injustice to him — you would as soon " strike an ab- 
stract idea." 

D. has been engaged, he tells me, through a course of labori- 
ous years, in an investigation into all curious matter connected 
with the two Universities ; and has lately lit upon a MS. collec- 
tion of cha rters, relative to C , by which he hopes to settle 

some disputed points — particularly that long controversy between 
them as to priority of foundation. The ardour with which he 
engages in these liberal pursuits, I am afraid, has not met with 

all the encouragement it deserved, either here, or at C . 

Your caputs, and heads of colleges, care less than anybody else 
about these questions. — Contented to suck the milky fountains of 
their Alma Maters, without inquiring into the venerable gentle- 
women's years, they rather hold such curiosities to be impertinent 
— unreverend. They have their good glebe lands in manu, and 
care not much to rake into the title deeds. I gather at least so 
much from other sources, for D. is not a man to complain. 

D. started like an unbroke heifer, when I interrupted him. 
A priori it was not very probable that we should have met in 
Oriel. But D. would have done the same, had I accosted him on 
the sudden in his own walks in Clifford 's-inn, or in the Temple. 
In addition to a provoking short-sightedness (the effect of late 
studies and watchings at the midnight oil) D. is the most absent 
of men. He made a call the other morning at our friend M.'s in 
Bedford-square ; and, finding nobody at home, was ushered into 
the hall, where, asking for pen and ink, with great exactitude of 
purpose he enters me his name in the book — which ordinarily 
lies about in such places, to record the failures of the untimely 
or unfortunate visitor — and takes his leave with many ceremonies, 
and professions of regret. Some two or three hours after, his 
walking destinies returned him into the same neighbourhood again, 
and again the quiet linage of the fire-side circle at M.'s — Mrs, 
M. presiding at it like a Queen Lar, with pretty A. S. at her 



14 ELIA. 

side — striking irresistibly on his fancy, he makes another call 
(forgetting that they were " certainly not to return from the 
country before that ^ay week"), and disappointed a second time, 
inquires for pen and paper as before : again the book is brought, 
and in the line just above that in which he is about to print his 
second name (his re-script) — his first name (scarce dry) looks out 
upon him like another Sosia, or as if a man should suddenly en- 
counter his own duplicate ! — The effect may be conceived. D. 
made many a good resolution against any such lapses in future. 
I hope he will not keep them too rigorously. 

For with G. D. — to be absent from the body, is sometimes 
(not to speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the 
very time when, personally encountering thee, he passes on with 

no recognition or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised 

— at that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor — or Parnassus 
— or co-sphered with Plato— or, with Harrington, framing " im- 
mortal commonwealths" — devising some plan of amelioration to 

thy country, or thy species perad venture meditating some 

individual kindness or courtesy, to be done to thee thyself, the re- 
turning consciousness of which made him to start so guiltily at 
thy obtruded personal presence. 

D. is delightful anywhere, but he is at the best in such places 
as these. He cares not much for Bath. He is out of his ele- 
ment at Buxton, at Scarborough, or Harrowgate. The Cam and 
the Isis are to him "better than all the waters of Damascus." 
On the Muses' hill he is happy, and good, as one of the Shepherds 
on the Delectable Mountains ; and when he goes about with you 
to show you the halls and colleges, you think you have with you 
the Interpreter at the He use Beautiful. 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 15 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 



In Mr. Lamb's " Works," published a year or two since, 1 
find a magnificent eulogy on my old school*, such as it was, 01 
now appears to him to have been, between the years 1782 and 
1789. It happens very oddly, that my own standing at Christ's 
was nearly corresponding with his ; and, with all gratitude to 
him for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I think he has contrived 
to -bring together whatever can be said in praise of them, drop, 
ping all the other side of the argument most ingeniously. 

I remember L. at school; and can well recollect that he had 
some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows 
had not. His friends lived in town, and were near at hand ; and 
he had the privilege of going to see them, almost as often as he 
wished, through some invidious distinction, which was denied to 
us. The present worthy sub-treasurer to the Inner Temple can 
explain how that happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in a 
morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny 
loaf— our crug — moistened with attenuated small beer, in wooden 
piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured 
from. Our Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the 
peas soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for 
him with a slice of " extraordinary bread and butter," from the 
hot-loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, some- 
what less repugnant — (we had three banyan to four meat days in 
the week) — was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-re- 
fined, and a smack of ginger (to make it go down the more glibly) 
or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our half -pickled Sundays, 
or quite fresh boiled be,ef on Thursdays (strong as caro equina), 

* Recollections of Christ's Hospital. 



16 ELIA. 

with detestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth — 
our scanty mutton scrags on Fridays — and rather more savoury, 
but grudging portions of the same flesh, rotten-roasted or rare, on 
the Tuesdays (the only dish which excited our appetites, and 
disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal proportion) — he had 
his hot plate of roast veal, or the more tempting griskin (exotics 
unknown to our palates), cooked in the paternal kitchen (a great 
thing), and brought him daily by his maid or aunt ! I remember 
the good old relative (in whom love forbade pride) squatting down 
upon some odd stone in a by-nook of the cloisters, disclosing the 
viands (of higher regale than those cates which the ravens min- 
istered to the Tishbite) ; and the contending passions of L. at 
the unfolding. There was love for the bringer ; shame for the 
thing brought, and the manner of its bringing ; sympathy for 
those who were too many to share in it ; and, at the top of all, 
hunger (eldest, strongest of the passions !) predominant, breaking 
down the stony fences of shame, and awkwardness, and a troub- 
ling over-consciousness. 

I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who 
should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances 
of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in the 
great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace 
to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my 
holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though 
I thought them few enough ; and, one after another, they all fail- 
ed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates. 

O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early home- 
stead ! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those 
unfledged years ! How, in my dreams, would my native lown 
(far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees, and 
faces ! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my 
heart exclaim upon sweet Calme in Wiltshire ! 

To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions left by the rec- 
ollection of those friendless holidays. The long warm days of 
summer never return but they bring with them a gloom from the 
haunting memory of those whole-day -leaves, when, by some 
strange arrangement, we were turned out, for the live-long day, 
upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to, or none. 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 17 

I remember those bathing excursions to the New-River, which 
L. recalls with such relish, better, I think, than he can — for he 
was a home-seeking lad, and did not much care for such water- 
pastimes : — How merrily we would sally forth into the fields ; 
and strip under the first warmth of the sun ; and wanton like 
young dace in the streams ; getting us appetites for noon, which 
those of us that were pennyless (our scanty morning crust long 
since exhausted) had not the means of allaying — while the cattle, 
and the birds, and the fishes, were at feed about us and we 
had nothing to satisfy our cravings — the very beauty of the 
day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty, 
setting a keener edge upon them! — How faint and languid, 
finally, we would return, towards night-fall, to our desired morsel, 
half- rejoicing, half- reluctant, that the hours of our uneasy liberty 
had expired ! 

It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the 
streets objectless — shivering at cold windows of print-shops, to 
extract a little amusement ; or haply, as a last resort in the hopes 
of a little novelty, to pay a fifty-times repeated visit (where our 
individual faces should be as well known to the warden as those 
of his own charges) to the Lions in the Tower — to whose levee, 
by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to admission. 

L.'s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the 
foundation) lived in a manner under his paternal roof. Any 
complaint which he had to make was sure of being attended to. 
This was understood at Christ's, and was an effectual screen to 
him against the severity of masters, or worse tyranny of the 
monitors. The oppressions of these young brutes are heart-sick- 
ening to call to recollection. I have been called out of my bed, 
and waked for the purpose, in the coldest winter nights — and this 
not once, but night after night — in my shirt, to receive the disci- 
pline of a leathern thong, with eleven other sufferers, because it 
pleased my callow overseer, when there has been any talking 
heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the 
dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable 
for an offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the power to 
hinder. The same execrable tyranny drove the younger part of 
us from the fires, when our feet were perishing with snow ; and, 

3 



18 ELIA. 

under the cruelest penalties, forbade the indulgence of a drink 
of water, when we lay in sleepless summer nights, fevered with 
the season, and the day's sports. 

There was one H , who, I learned, in after days, was seen 

expiating some maturer offence in the hulks. (Do I flatter my- 
self in fancying that this might be the planter of that name, who 
suffered — at Nevis, I think, or St. Kitts, — some few years since ? 
My friend Tobin was the benevolent instrument of bringing him 
to the gallows.) This petty Nero actually branded a boy, who 
had offended him, with a red-hot iron ; and nearly starved forty 
of us, with exacting contributions, to the one half of our bread, 
to pamper a young ass, which, incredible as it may seem, with 
the connivance of the nurse's daughter (a young flame of his) he 
had contrived to smuggle in, and keep upon the leads of the ward, 
as they called our dormitories. This game went on for better 
than a week, till the foolish beast, not able to fare well but he 
must cry roast meat — happier than Caligula's minion, could he 
have kept his own counsel — but, foolisher, alas ! than any of his 
species in the fables — waxing fat, and kicking, in the fulness of 
bread, one unlucky minute would needs proclaim his good fortune 
to the world below ; and, laying out his simple throat, blew such 
a ram's-horn blast, as (toppling down the walls of his own Jeri- 
cho) set concealment any longer at defiance. The client was dis- 
missed, with certain attentions, to Smithfleld ; but I never under- 
stood that the patron underwent any censure on the occasion. 
This was in the stewardship of L.'s admired Perry. 

Under the same facile administration, can L. have forgotten 
the cool impunity with which the nurses used to carry away 
openly, in open platters, for their own tables, one out of two of 
every hot joint, which the careful matron had been seeing scru- 
pulously weighed out for our dinners ? These things were daily 
practised in that magnificent apartment, which L. (grown con- 
noisseur since, we presume) praises so highly for the grand paint- 
ings " by Verrio, and others," with which it is " hung round and 
adorned." But the sight of sleek well-fed blue-coat boys in pic- 
tures was, at that time, I believe, little consolatory to him, or us, 
the living ones, who saw the better part of our provisions carried 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-TH1RTY YEARS AGO. 19 

away before our faces by harpies ; and ourselves reduced (with 
the Trojan in the Hall of Dido) 

To feed our mind with idle portraiture. 

L. has recorded the repugnance of the school to gags, or th^ 
fat of fresh beef boiled ; and sets it down to some superstition. 
But these unctuous morsels are never grateful to young palates 
(children are universally fat-haters), and in strong, coarse, boiled 
meats, unsalted, are detestable. A gag-eater in our time was 
equivalent to a goule, and held in equal detestation. suf- 
fered under the imputation : 

'Twas said 



He ate strange flesh. 

He was observed, after dinner, carefully to gather up the rem- 
nants left at his table (not many, nor very choice fragments, you 
may credit me, — and, in an especial manner, these disreputable 
morsels, which he would convey away, and secretly stow in the 
settle that stood at his bedside. None saw when he ate them. 
It was rumoured that he privately devoured them in the night. 
He was watched, but no traces of such midnight practices were 
discoverable. Some reported, that, on leave-days, he had been 
seen to carry out of the bounds a large blue check handkerchief, 
full of something. This then must be the accursed thing. Con- 
jecture next was at work to imagine how he could dispose of it. 
Some said he sold it to the beggars. This belief generally pre- 
vailed. He went about moping. None spake to him. No one 
would play with him. He was excommunicated ; put out of the 
pale of the school. He was too powerful a boy to be beaten, but 
he underwent every mode of that negative punishment, which is 
more grievous than many stripes. Still he persevered. At length 
he was observed by two of his school- fellows, who were deter- 
mined to get at the secret, and had traced him one leave-day for 
that purpose, to enter a large worn-out building, such as there 
exist specimens of in Chancery-lane, which are let out to various 
scales of pauperism, with open door and a common staircase. 
After him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth up four 



21) ELIA. 

flights, and saw him tap at a poor wicket, which was opened by 
an aged woman, meanly clad. Suspicion was now ripened into 
certainty. The informers had secured their victim. They had 
him in their toils. Accusation was formally preferred, and retri- 
bution most signal was looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the then 
steward (for this happened a little after my time,) with that pa- 
tient sagacity which tempered all his conduct, determined to in- 
vestigate the matter, before he proceeded to sentence. The result 
was, that the supposed mendicants, the receivers or -purchasers 

of the mysterious scraps, turned out to be the parents of , an 

honest couple come to decay — whom this seasonable supply had, 
in all probability, saved from mendicancy ; and that this young 
stork, at the expense of his own good name, had all this while 
been only feeding the old birds ! — The governors on this occasion, 

much to their honour, voted a present relief to the family of , 

and presented him with a silver medal. The lesson which the 
steward read upon rash judgment, on the occasion of publicly 

delivering the medal to , I believe would not be lost upon his 

auditory. — I had left school then, but I well remember . 

He was a tall, shambling youth, with a cast in his eye, not at all 
calculated to conciliate hostile prejudices. I have since seen him 
carrying a baker's basket. I think I heard he did not do quite so 
well by himself, as he had done by the old folks. 

I was a hypochondriac lad ; and the sight of a boy in fetters, 
upon the day of my first putting on the blue clothes, was not ex- 
actly fitted to assuage the natural terrors of initiation. I was of 
tender years, barely turned of seven ; and had only read of such 
things in books, or seen them but in dreams. I was told he had 
run away. This was the punishment for the first offence. — As a 
novice I was soon after taken to see the dungeons. These were 
little, square, Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his 
length upon straw and a blanket — a mattress, I think, was after- 
wards substituted — with a peep of light, let in askance, from a 
prison-orifice at top, barely enough to read by. Here the poor 
boy was locked in by himself all day, without sight of any but 
the porter who brought him his bread and water — who might not 
speak to him ; or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call 
him out to receive his periodical chastisement, which was almost 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 21 

welcome, because it separated him for a brief interval from soli- 
tude : — and here he was shut up by himself of nights out of the 
reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the weak nerves, 
and superstition incident to his time of life, might subject him to.* 
This was the penalty for the second offence. Wouldst thou like, 
reader, to see what became of him in the next degree ? 

The culprit, who had been a third time an offender, and whose 
expulsion was at this time deemed irreversible, was brought forth, 
as at some solemn auto dafe, arrayed in uncouth and most ap- 
palling attire — all trace of his late " watchet weeds M carefully 
effaced, he was exposed in a jacket resembling those which Lon- 
don lamplighters formerly delighted in, with a cap of the same. 
The effect of this divestiture was such as the ingenious devisers 
of it could have anticipated. With his pale and frighted features, 
it was as if some of those disfigurements in Dante had seized 
upon him. In this disguisement he was brought into the hall 
{L^s favorite state-room), where awaited him the whole number 
of his school- fellows, whose joint lessons and sports he was thence- 
forth to share no more ; the awful presence of the steward, to be 
seen for the last time ; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state 
robe for the occasion; and of two faces more, of direr import, 
because never but in these extremities visible. These were 
governors ; two of whom by choice, or charter, were always ac- 
customed to officiate at these Ultima Supplicia ; not to mitigate 
(so at least we understood it), but to enforce the uttermost stripe. 
Old Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter Aubert, I remember, were col- 
leagues on one occasion, when the beadle turning rather pale a 
glass of brandy was ordered to prepare him for the mysteries. 
The scourging was, after the old Roman fashion, long and stately. 
The lictor accompanied the criminal quite round the hall. We 
were generally too faint with attending to the previous disgusting 
circumstances, to make accurate report with our eyes of the de- 

* One or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide, accordingly, at 
length convinced the governors of the impolicy of this part of the sentence, 
and the midnight torture to the spirits was dispensed with. — This fancy of 
dungeons for children was a sprout of Howard's brain ; for which (saving 
the reverence due to Holy Paul) methinks, I could willingly spit upon his 
stat ue. 



22 ELIA. 

gree of corporal suffering inflicted. Report, of course, gave out 
the back knotty and livid. After scourging, he was made over, 
in his San Benito, to his friends, if he had any (but commonly 
such poor runagates were friendless), or to his parish-officer, who, 
to enhance the effect of the scene, had his station allotted to him 
on the outside of the hall gate. 

These solemn pageantries were not played off so often as to 
spoil the general mirth of the community. We had plenty of 
exercise and recreation after school hours ; and, for myself, I 
must confess, that I was never happier, than in them. The 
Upper and the Lower Grammar School were held in the same 
room ; and an imaginary line only divided their bounds. Their 
character was as different as that of the inhabitants on the two 
sides of the Pyrenees. The Rev. James Boyer was the Upper 
Master ; but the Rev. Matthew Field presided over that portion 
of the apartment of which I had the good fortune to be a member. 
We lived a life as careless as birds. We talked and did just 
what we pleased, and nobody molested us. We carried an acci- 
dence, or a grammar, for form : but, for any trouble it gave us, 
we might take two years in getting through the verbs deponent, 
and another two in forgetting all that we had learned about them. 
There was now and then the formality of saying a lesson, but if 
you had not learned it, a brush across the shoulders (just enough 
to disturb a fly) was the sole remonstrance. Field never used 
the rod ; and in truth he wielded the cane with no great good 
will — holding it " like a dancer." It looked in his hands rather 
like an emblem than an instrument of authority ; and an emblem, 
too, he was ashamed of. He was a good easy man, that did not 
care to ruffle his own peace, nor perhaps set any great conside- 
ration upon the value of juvenile time. He came among us, now 
and then, but often stayed away whole days from us ; and when 
he came it made no difference to us — he had his private room to 
retire too, the short time he stayed, to be out of the sound of oui 
noise. Our mirth and uproar went on. We had classics of our 
own, without being beholden to " insolent Greece or haughty 
Rome," that passed current among us — Peter Wilkins — the Ad- 
ventures of the Hon. Captain Robert Boyle — the Fortunate Blue 
Coat Boy — and the like. Or we cultivated a turn for mechanic 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 23 

and scientific operations ; making little sun-dials of paper : or 
weaving those ingenious parentheses called cat-cradles ; or mak- 
ing dry peas to dance upon the end of a tin pipe ; or studying the 
art military over the laudable game " French and English," and 
a hundred other such devices to pass away the time — mixing the 
useful with the agreeable — as would have made the souls of 
Rousseau and John Locke chuckle to have seen us. 

Matthew Field belonged to that class of modest divines who 
affect to mix in equal proportion the gentle?nan, the scholar, and 
the Christian ; but, I know not how, the first ingredient is gene- 
rally found to be the predominating dose in the composition. He 
was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtly bow at some 
episcopal levee, when he should have been attending upon us. 
He had for many years the classical charge of a hundred chil- 
dren, during the four or five first years of their education ; and 
his very highest form seldom proceeded further than two or three 
of the introductory fables of Phsedrus. How things were suffered 
to go on thus I cannot guess. Boyer, who was the proper person 
to have remedied these abuses, always affected, perhaps felt, a 
delicacy in interfering in a province not strictly his own. I have 
not been without my suspicions, that he was not altogether dis- 
pleased at the contrast we presented to his end of the school. 
We were a sort of Helots to his young Spartans. He would 
sometimes, with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the 
Under Master, and then, with Sardonic grin, observe to one of 
his upper boys, " how neat and fresh the twigs looked." While 
his pale students were battering their brains over Xenophon and 
Plato, with a silence as deep as that enjoined by the Samite, we 
were enjoying ourselves at our ease in our little Goshen. We 
saw a little into the secrets of his discipline, and the prospect did 
but the more reconcile us to our lot. His thunders rolled inno- 
cuous for us ; his storms came near, but never touched us ; con- 
trary to Gideon's miracle, while all around were drenched, our 
fleece was dry.* His boys turned out the better scholars ; we, I 
suspect, have the advantage in temper. His pupils cannot speak 
of him without something of terror allaying their gratitude ; the 

* Cowlev 



24 ELLA. 

remembrance of Field comes back with all the soothing images 
of indolence, and summer slumbers, and work like play, and in- 
nocent idleness, and Elysian exemptions, and life itself a " play- 
ing holiday." 

Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we 
were near enough (as I have said) to understand a little of his 
system. We occasionally heard sounds of the Ululantes, and 
caught glances of Tartarus. B. was a rabid pedant. His Eng- 
lish style was crampt to barbarism. His Easter anthems (for his 
duty obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as 
scrannel pipes.* — He would laugh, ay, and heartily, but then it 

must be at Flaccus's quibble about Hex or at the tristis se- 

Veritas in vultu, or inspicere in patinas, of Terence — thin jests, 
which at their first broaching could hardly have had vis enough 
to move a Roman muscle. — He had two wigs, both pedantic, but 
of different omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh-powdered, be- 
tokening a mild day. The other, an old, discolored, unkempt, 
angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. Wo to 
the school, when he made his morning appearance in his passy, 
or passionate wig. No comet expounded surer. — J. B. had a 
heavy hand. I have known him double his knotty fist at a poor 
trembling child (the maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips) with a 
" Sirrah, do you presume to set your wits at me ?" — Nothing was 
more common than to see him make a headlong entry into the 
school-room, from his inner recess, or library, and, with turbulent 
eye, singling out a lad, roar out, " Od's my life, sirrah " (his 
favorite adjuration), " I have a greatmind to whip you," — then, 
with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into his lair — and, 
after a cooling lapse of some minutes (during which all but the 
culprit had totally forgotten the context) drive headlong out again, 

* In this and everything B. was the antipodes of his coadjutor. While 
the former was digging his brains for crude anthems, worth a pig-nut, F 
would be recreating his gentlemanly fancy in the more flowery walks of the 
Muses. A little dramatic effusion of his, under the name of Vertumnus 
and Pomona, is not yet forgotten by the chroniclers of that sort of literature. 
It was accepted by Garrick, but the town did not give it their sanction. — B. 
used to say of it, in a way of half-compliment, half- irony, that itwaa too clas- 
sical for representation. 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 25 

piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been some Devil's 
Litany, with the expletory yell — "and I will, too ." — In his 
gentler moods, when the rabidus furor was assuaged, he had re- 
sort to an ingenious method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to 
himself, of whipping the boy, and reading the Debates, at the 
same time ; a paragraph, and a lash between ; which in those 
times, when parliamentary oratory was most at a height and 
flourishing in these realms, was not calculated to impress the 
patient with a veneration for the difFuser graces of rhetoric. 

Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was known to fall ineffec- 
tual from his hand — when droll squinting W — having been caught 
putting the inside of the master's desk to a use for which the 
architect had clearly not designed it, to justify himself, with great 
simplicity averred, that he did not know that the thing had been fore- 
warned. This exquisite irrecognition of any law antecedent to 
the oral or declaratory, struck so irresistibly upon the fancy of all 
who heard it (the pedagogue himself not excepted) — that remis- 
sion was unavoidable. 

L. has given credit to B.'s great merits as an instructor. Cole- 
ridge, in his literary life, has pronounced a more intelligible and 
ample encomium on them. The author of the Country Spectator 
doubts not to compare him with the ablest teachers of antiquity. 
Perhaps we cannot dismiss him better than with the pious ejacula- 
tion of C, when he heard that his old master was on his death- 
bed : " Poor J. B. ! — may all his faults be forgiven ; and may he 
be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys all head and wings, with 
no bottoms to reproach his sublunary infirmities." 

Under him were many good and sound scholars bred. — First 
Grecian of my time was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, kindest of boys 
and men, since Co-grammar-master (and inseparable companion) 

with Dr. T e. What an edifying spectacle did this brace of 

friends present to those who remembered the anti-socialities of 
their predecessors ! — You never met the one by chance in the 
street without a wonder, which was quickly dissipated by the 
almost immediate sub-appearance of the other. Generally arm- 
in-arm, these kindly coadjutors lightened for each other the toil- 
some duties of their profession, and when, in advanced age, one 
found it convenient to retire, the other was not long in discovering 



26 ELIA. 

that it suited him to lay down the fasces also. Oh, it is pleasant, 
as it is rare, to find the same arm linked in yours at forty, which 
at thirteen helped it to turn over the Cicero de Amicitia, or some 
tale of Antique Friendship, which the young heart even then was 

burning to anticipate ! — Co-Grecian with S. was Th ,who has 

since executed with ability various diplomatic functions at the 

Northern courts. Th was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, 

sparing of speech, with raven locks. — Thomas Fanshaw Middle- 
ton followed him (now Bishop of Calcutta), a scholar and a gen- 
tleman in his teens. He has the reputation of an excellent critic ; 
and is author (besides the Country Spectator) of a Treatise on 
the Greek Article, against Sharpe. M. is said to bear his mitre 
high in India, where the regni novitas (I dare say) sufficiently 
justifies the bearing. A humility quite as primitive as that of 
Jewel or Hooker might not be exactly fitted to impress the minds 
of those Anglo-Asiatic diocesans with a reverence for home insti- 
tutions, and the church which those fathers watered. The man- 
ners of M. at school, though firm, were mild and unassuming. — 
Next to M. (if not senior to him) was Richards, author of the 
Aboriginal Britons, the most spirited of the Oxford Prize Poems ; 

a pale, studious Grecian. — Then followed poor S , ill-fated 

M ! of these the Muse is silent. 

Finding some of Edward's race 
Unhappy, pass their annals by. 

Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring 
of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee — the 
dark pillar not yet turned — Samuel Taylor Coleridge— Logician, 
Metaphysician, Bard! — How have I seen the casual passer 
through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while 
he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of 
the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet 
intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in 
those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), 

or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar while the walls of 

the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired 
charity-boy ! — Many were the " wit combats" (to dally awhile 
with the words of old Fuller) between him and C. V. Le G , 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 21 

fi which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon, and an Eng- 
lish man of war ; Master Coleridge, like the former, was built 
far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. C. 
V. L., with the English man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter 
in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advan- 
tage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention. 5 ' 

Nor shalt thou, their compeer, be quickly forgotten, Allen, with 
the cordial smile, and still more cordial laugh, with which thou 
wert wont to make the old Cloisters shake, in thy cognition of 
some poignant jest of theirs ; or the anticipation of some more 
material, and peradventure practical one, of thine own. Extinct 
are those smiles, with that beautiful countenance, with which (for 
thou wert the Nireus formosus of the school), in the days of thy 
maturer waggery, thou didst disarm the wrath of infuriated town- 
damsel, who, incensed by provoking pinch, turning tigress-like 
round, suddenly converted by thy angel look, exchanged the half- 
formed terrible " hi ," for a gentler greeting — " bless thy hand- 

some face !" 

Next follow two, who ought to be now alive, and the friends of 

Elia — the junior Le G and F ; who impelled, the former 

by a roving temper, the latter by too quick a sense of neglect — 
ill capable of enduring the slights poor Sizars are sometimes sub- 
ject to in our seats of learning — exchanged their Alma Mater for 
the camp ; perishing, one by climate, and one on the plains of 

Salamanca ; — Le G , sanguine, volatile, sweet-natured ; 

F dogged, faithful, anticipative of insult, warm-hearted, with 

something of the old Roman height about him. 

Fine, frank-hearted Fr , the present master of Hertford, 

with Marmaduke T , mildest of Missionaries- — and both my 

good friends still — close the catalogue of Grecians in my time. 



ELIA. 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN. 



v 

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, 
is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the 
men who lend. To these two original diversities may be reduced 
all those impertinent classifications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, 
white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upon earth, 
" Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites," flock hither, and do na- 
turally fall in with one or other of these primary distinctions. 
The infinite superiority of the former, which I choose to designate 
as the great race, is discernible in their figure, port, and a certain 
instinctive sovereignty. The latter are born degraded. "He 
shall serve his brethren." There is something in the air of one 
of this cast, lean and suspicious ; contrasting with the open, trust- 
ing, generous manners of the other. 

Observe who have been the greatest borrowers of all ages — 
Alcibiades — FalstafF — Sir Richard Steele — our late incomparable 
Brinsley — what a family likeness in all four ! 

What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower ! what 
rosy gills ! what a beautiful reliance on Providence doth he mani- 
fest, — taking no more thought than lilies ! What contempt for 
money, — accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than 
dross ! What a liberal confounding of those pedantic distinctions 
of meum and tuum I or rather, what a noble simplification of lan- 
guage (beyond Tooke), resolving these supposed opposites into one 
clear, intelligible pronoun adjective ! — What near approaches doth 
he make to the primitive community, — to the extent of one half of 
the principle at least. 

He is the true taxer who " calleth all the world up to be taxed * 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN. 29 

and the distance is as vast between him and one of us, as subsisted 
between the Augustan Majesty and the poorest obolary Jew that 
paid it tribute-pittance at Jerusalem ! — His exactions, too, have 
such a cheerful, voluntary air ! So far removed from your sour 
parochial or state-gatherers, — those ink-horn varlets, who carry 
their want of welcome in their faces ! He cometh to you with a 
smile, and troubleth you with no receipt ; confining himself to no 
set season. Every day is his Candlemas, or his Feast of Holy 
Michael. He applieth the lene tormentum of a pleasant look to 
your purse, — which to that gentle warmth expands her silken 
leaves, as naturally as the cloak of the traveller, for which sun 
and wind contended ! He is the true Propontic which never 
ebbeth ! The sea which taketh handsomely at each man's hand. 
In vain the victim, whom he delighteth to honor, struggles with 
destiny ; he is in the net. Lend therefore cheerfully, O man. 
ordained to lend — that thou lose not in the end, with thy worldly 
penny, the reversion promised. Combine not preposterously in 
thine own person the penalties of Lazarus and of Dives ! — but, 
when thou seest the proper authority coming, meet it smilingly, 
as it were half-way. Come, a handsome sacrifice ! See how 
light he makes of it ! Strain not courtesies with a noble enemy. 
Reflections like the foregoing were forced upon my mind by the 
death of my old friend, Ralph Bigod, Esq., who parted this life, 
on Wednesday evening ; dying, as he had lived, without much 
trouble. He boasted himself a descendent from mighty ancestors 
of that name, who heretofore held ducal dignities in this realm. 
In his actions and sentiments he belied not the stock to which he 
pretended. Early in life he found himself invested with ample 
revenues ; which, with that noble disinterestedness which I have 
noticed as inherent in men of the great race, he took almost im- 
mediate measures entirely to dissipate and bring to nothing : for 
there is something revolting in the idea of a king holding a pri- 
vate purse ; and the thoughts of Bigod were all regal. Thus 
furnished by the very act of disfurnishment ; getting rid of the 
cumbersome luggage of riches, more apt (as one sings) 

To.slacken virtue, and abate her edge, 

Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise, 



30 ELIA. 

he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his great enterprise, " bor. 
rowing and to borrow !" 

In his periegesis, or triumphant progress throughout this island, 
it has been calculated that he laid a tythe part of the inhabitants 
under contribution. I reject this estimate as greatly exagge- 
rated : but having had the honor of accompanying my friend 
divers times, in his perambulations about this vast city, I own I 
was greatly struck at first with the prodigious number of faces 
we met, who claimed a sort of respectful acquaintance with us. 
He was one day so obliging as to explain the phenomenon. It 
seems, these were his tributaries; feeders of his exchequer; 
gentlemen, his good friends (as he was pleased to express him- 
self), to whom he had occasionally been beholden for a loan. 
Their multitudes did no way disconcert him. He rather took a 
pride in numbering them ; and, with Comus, seemed pleased to 
be " stocked with so fair a herd.' 5 

With such sources, it was a wonder how he contrived to keep 
his treasury always empty. He did it by force of an aphorism, 
which he had often in his mouth, that " money kept longer than 
three days stinks.' 5 So he made use of it while it was fresh. 
A good part he drank away (for he was an excellent toss-pot) ; 
some he gave away, the rest he threw away, literally tossing and 
hurling it violently from him — as boys do burrs, or as if it had 
been infectious, — into ponds, or ditches, or deep holes, inscrutable 
cavities of the earth ; — or he would bury it (where he would 
never seek it again) by a river's side under some bank, which (he 
would facetiously observe) paid no interest — but out away from 
him it must go peremptorily, as Hagar's offspring into the wilder- 
ness, while it was sweet. He never missed it. The streams 
were perennial which fed his fisc. When new supplies became 
necessary, the first person that had the felicity to fall in with 
him, friend or stranger, was sure to contribute to the deficiency. 
For Bigod had an undeniable way with him. He had a cheerful, 
open exterior, a quick jovial eye, a bald forehead, just touched 
with grey (cana fides). He anticipated no excuse, and found 
none. And, waiving for a while my theory as to the great race, 
I would put it to the most untheorising reader, who may at times 
have disposable coin in his pocket, whether it is not more repug- 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN. 31 

nant to the kindliness of his nature to refuse such a one as I am 
describing, than to say no to a poor petitionary rogue (your bas- 
tard borrower), who, by his mumping visnomy, tells you, that he 
expects nothing better ; and, therefore, whose preconceived notions 
and expectations you do in reality so much less shock in the 
refusal. 

When I think of this man ; his fiery glow of heart ; his swell 
of feeling ; how magnificent, how ideal he was ; how great at 
the midnight hour ; and when I compare with him the compa- 
nions with whom I have associated since, I grudge the saving of 
a few idle ducats, and think that I am fallen into the society of 
lenders, and little men. 

To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather 
covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators 
more formidable than that which I have touched upon ; I mean 
your borrowers of books — those mutilators of collections, spoilers 
of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There 
is Comberbatch, matchless in his depredations ! 

That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye- 
tooth knocked out — (you are now with me in my little back study 

in Bloomsbury, reader !) with the huge Switzer-like tomes on 

each side (like the Guild-hall giants, in their reformed posture, 
guardant of nothing) once held the tallest of my folios, Opera 
Bonaventurce, choice and massy divinity, to which its two sup- 
porters (school divinity also, but of a lesser calibre, — Bellarmine, 
and Holy Thomas), showed but as dwarfs, — itself an Ascapart ! — 
that Comberbatch abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, 
which is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, 
namely, that " the title to property in a book (my Bonaventure, 
for instance), is in exact ratio to the claimant's powers of under- 
standing and appreciating the same." Should he go on acting 
upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe 2 

The slight vacuum in the left-hand case — two shelves from the 
ceiling — scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser — 
was whilom the commodious resting-place of Brown on Urn 
Burial. C. will hardly allege that he knows more about that 
treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and was indeed the 
first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties — but so have I 



32 ELIA. 

known a foolish lover to praise his mistress in the presence of a 
rival more qualified to carry her off than himself. Just below, 
Dodsley's dramas want their fourth volume, where Vittoria Co- 
rombona is ! The remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam's 
refuse sons, when the Fates borrowed Hector. Here stood the 
Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state. There loitered the 
Complete Angler ; quiet as in life, by some stream side. In yon- 
der nook, John Buncle, a widower- volume, with " eyes closed," 
mourns his ravished mate. 

One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes b like the 
sea, sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sea-like, he throws 
up as rich an equivalent to match it. I have a small under-col- 
lection of this nature (my friend's gatherings in his various calls), 
picked up, he has forgotten at what odd places, and deposited 
with as little merrlory at mine. I take in these orphans, the 
twice-deserted. These proselytes of the gate are welcome as the 
true Hebrews. There they stand in conjunction ; natives, and 
naturalized. The latter seem as little disposed to inquire out 
their true lineage as I am. I charge no warehouse, room for 
these deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the ungentlemanly 
trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses. 

To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it. 
You are sure that he will make one hearty meal on your viands, 
if he can give no account of the platter after it. But what 
moved thee, wayward, spiteful K., to be so importunate to carry 
off with thee, in spite of tears and adjurations to thee to forbear, 
the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret 
Newcastle ? — knowing at the time, and knowing that I knew 
also, thou most assuredly wouldst never turn over one leaf of the 
illustrious folio : — what but the mere spirit of contradiction, and 
childish love of getting the better of thy friend ? Then, worst 
cut of all ! to transport it with thee to the Gallican land — 

Unworthy land to harbor such a sweetness, 

A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt, 

Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her sex's wonder ! 

hadst thou not thy play-books, and books of jests and fancies, 
about thee, to keep thee merry, even as thou keepest all compa- 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN. 33 

nies with thy quips and mirthful tales ? Child of the Green- 
room, it was unkindly done of thee. Thy wife, too, that part- 
French, better-part English- woman ! — that she could fix Upon no 
other treatise to bear away, in kindly token of remembering us, 
than the works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brook — of which no 
Frenchman, nor woman of France, Italy, or England, was ever 
by nature constituted to comprehend a tittle ! — Was there not Zim- 
merman on Solitude ? 

Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, 
be shy of showing it ; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, 
lend thy books ; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. — he will 
return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with 
usury ; enriched with annotations tripling their value. I have 
had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his — (in 
matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying 
with the originals) in no very clerkly hand — legible in my 
Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those ab- 
struser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas ! wandering in 
Pagan lands. I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, 
against S. T. C. 



34 ELIA. 



NEW YEAR'S EVE. 



Every man hath two birth-days : two days, at least, in every year, 
which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his 
mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner 
he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, 
this custom of solemnizing our proper birth-day hath nearly 
passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about 
the matter, nor understand anything in it beyond cake and orange. 
But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pre- 
termitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the first of 
January with indifference. It is that from which all date their 
time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our com- 
mon Adam, 

Of all sound of all bells— (bells, the music nighest bordering 
upon heaven) — most solemn and touching is the peal which rings 
out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my 
mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused 
over the past twelvemonth ; all I have done or suffered, perform- 
ed or neglected — in that regretted time. I begin to know its 
worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal color ; nor 
was it a poetical flight in a contemporary, when he exclaimed, 

I saw the skirts of the departing Year. 

It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems 
to be conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, 
and all felt it with me, last night ; though some of my companions 
affected rather to manifest an exhilaration at the birth of the com- 
ing year, than any very tender regrets for the decease of its pre- 
decessor. But I am none of those who— 



NEW YEAR'S EVE. 35 

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest. 

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties ; new books, new 
faces, new years, — from some mental twist which makes it diffi- 
cult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope ; 
and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I 
plunge into foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell- 
mell with past disappointments. I am armor-proof against old 
discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversa- 
ries. I play over again for love, as the gamesters phrase it, 
games, for Which. I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have 
any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. 
I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-con- 
trived novel. Methinks it is better that I should have pined 
away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair 

hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W n, than that so passionate a 

love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our family 
should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, 
than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in 
banco, and be without the idea of the specious old rogue. 

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back 
upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say, 
that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man ms/ 
have leave to love himself, without the imputation of self-love ? 

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspec- 
tive — and mine is painfully so — can have a less respect for his 
present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be 
light, and vain, and humorsome ; a notorious * * * • addicted 
to * * * * : averse from counsel, neither taking it nor offering 
it • — * * * besides ; a stammering buffoon ; what you will ; lay it 
on, and spare not : I subscribe to it all, and much more than thou 

canst be willing to lay at his door but for the child Elia, that 

"other me," there, in the back-ground. — I must take leave to 
cherish the remembrance of that young master — with as little 
reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and- forty, as 
if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents. 
I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medica- 
ments. I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at 



36 ELIA. 

Christ's and. awake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of 
maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched * 
its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least color of false- 
hood. God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed ! — Thou art 
sophisticated. — I know how honest, how courageous (for a weak- 
ling) it was — how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful ! From 
what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed 
myself, — and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false 
identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate 
the tone of my moral being ! 

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in 
such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyn- 
crasy. Or is it owing to another cause : simply, that being with- 
out wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough 
out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, 
I turn back upon memory, and adopt my own early idea, as my 
heir and favorite ? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, 
reader — (a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of 
thy sympathy, and am singularly conceited only, I retire, im- 
penetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia. 

The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character 
not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution ; 
and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with cir- 
cumstances of peculiar ceremony. — In those days the sound of 
those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all 
around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into 
my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought 
of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone but 
the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. 
He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily 
on the fragility of life ; but he brings it not home to himself, any 
more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination 
the freezing days of December. But now, shall I confess a 
! truth? — I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count 
the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure 
of moments and shortest periods, like misers' farthings. In pro- 
portion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count 
upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon 



NEW YEAR'S EVE. 37 

the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away 
"like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor 
sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be 
carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity ; 
and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with 
this green earth ; the face of town and country ; the unspeakable 
rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up 
my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to 
which I am arrived ; I, and my friends : to be no younger, no 
richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age ; or 
drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. — Any altera- 
tion, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and dis- 
composes me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and 
are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek 
Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me. 

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer 
holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of 
meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle- 
light and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, 
and irony itself- — do these things go out with life ? 

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are 
pleasant with him ? 

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios ! must I part with 
the intense delight of having you (huge armfulls) in my embra- 
ces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some 
awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar 
process of reading ? 

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications 
which point me to them here, — the recognizable face — the " sweet 
assurance of a look" — ? 

In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying — to give it 
its mildest name— does more especially haunt and beset me. In 
a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost 
problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy 
an immortality. Then we expand and bourgeon. Then we are 
as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal 
taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts 
of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon thai 



38 ELIA. 

master feeling ; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity ; moonlight 
itself, with its shadowy and spectral appearances, — that cold 
ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister, like that innutritious 
one denounced in the Canticles : — I am none of her minions — I 
hold with the Persian. 

Whatever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death 
into my mind. All partial evils, like humors, run into that capi-^ 
tal plague-sore. I have heard some profess an indifference to 
life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge ; 
and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may 

slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death but out 

upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom ! I detest, abhor, exe- 
crate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six-score thousand 
devils, as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned 
as an universal viper ; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil 
of. In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melan- 
choly Privation, or more frightful and confounding Positive ! 

Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are alto- 
gether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfactior. 
hath a man, that he shall " lie down with kings and emperors in 
death," who in his life-time never greatly coveted the society 
of such bed-fellows ? — or, forsooth, that " so shall the fairest face 

appear ?" — why, to comfort me, must Alice W n be a goblin ? 

More than all, I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbe- 
coming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. 
Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with 
his odious truism, that "Such as he now is I must shortly be." 
Not so shortly, friend, perhaps as thou imaginest. In the mean 
time I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. 
Know thy betters ! Thy New Years' days are past. I survive, 
a jolly candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine — and while 
that turn-coat bell, that just now mournfully chanted the obse- 
quies of 1820 departed, with changed notes lustily rings in a 
successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a like occa- 
sion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton. 



NEW-YEAR'S EVE. d9 



THE NEW YEAR. 



Hark the cock crows, and yon bright star 

Tells us the day himself 's not far ; 

And see where, breaking from the night, 

He gilds the western hills with light. 

With him old Janus doth appear, 

Peeping into the future year. 

With such a look as seems to say, 

The prospect is not good that way. 

Thus do we rise ill sights to see, 

And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy ; 

When the prophetic fear of things 

A more tormenting mischief brings, 

More full of soul-tormenting gall 

Than direst mischiefs can befall. 

But. stay ! but stay ! methinks my sight, 

Better inform'd by clearer light, 

Discerns sereneness in that brow, 

That all contracted seem'd but now. 

His reversed face may show distaste, 

And frown upon the ills are past ; 

But that which this way looks is clear, 

And smiles upon the New-born Year. 

He looks too from a place so high, 

The Year lies open to his eye ; 

And all the moments open are 

To the exact discoverer. 

Yet more and more he smiles upon 

The happy revolution. 

Why should we then suspect or fear 

The influences of a year, 

So smiles upon us the first morn, 

And speaks us good so soon as born ? 

Plague on't ! the last was ill enough, 

This cannot but make better proof; 

Or, at the worst, as we brushed through 

The last, why so we may this too ; 

And then the next in reason should 

Be superexcellently good : 

For the worst ills we daily see 

Have no more perpetuity 

Than the best fortunes that do fall 

Which also bring us wherewithal 

Longer their being to support, 



iO ELIA. 

Than those do of the other sort : 

And who has one good year in three, 

And yet repines at destiny, 

Appears ungrateful in the case, 

And merits not the good he has. 

Then let us welcome the New Guest 

With lusty brimmers of the best ; 

Mirth always should Good Fortune meet , 

And renders e'en Disaster sweet : 

And though the Princess turn her back, 

Let us but line ourselves with sack, 

We better shall by far hold out, 

Till the next Year she face about 

How say you, reader- — do not these verses smack of the rough 
magnanimity of the old English vein ? Do they not fortify like 
a cordial ; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, 
and generous spirits, in the concoction ? Where be those puling 
fears of death, just now expressed or affected ? — Passed like a 
cloud — absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry — clean 
washed away by a wave of genuine Helicon, your only Spa for 
these hypochondries — And now another cup of the generous ! 
and a merry New Year, and many of them to you all, my 
masters ' 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 41 



MRS, BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. 



" A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game. 5 ' 
This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with God), 
who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of whist. She 
was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half-and-half play- 
ers, who have no objection to take a hand, if you want one to 
make up a rubber ; who affirm that they have no pleasure in 
winning ; that they like to win one game and lose another ; that 
they can while away an hour very agreeably at a card-table, but 
are indifferent whether they play or no ; and will desire an ad- 
versary who has slipped a wrong card to take it up and play 
another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table. 
One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said 
that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them. 

Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I 
do, from her heart and soul, and would not, save upon a striking 
emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table with them. 
She loved a thorough-paced partner, a determined enemy. She 
took, and gave, no concessions. She hated favors. She never 
made a revoke, nor ever passed it over in her adversary without 
exacting the utmost forfeiture. She fought a good fight : cut and 
thrust. She held not her good sword (her cards) " like a dancer." 
She sate bolt upright ; and neither showed you her cards nor 
desired to see yours. All people have their blind side — their 
superstitions ; and I have heard her declare, under the rose, that 
hearts was her favorite suit. 

I never in my life — and I knew Sarah Battle many of the best 
years of it — saw her take out her snuff-box when it was her turn 
to play ; or snuff a candle in the middle of a game ; or ring for 



42 EIJA. 

a servant till it was fairly over. She never introduced, or con- 
nived at, miscellaneous conversation during its process. As she 
emphatically observed, cards were cards ; and if I ever saw un- 
mingled distaste in her fine last-century countenance, it was at 
the airs of a young gentleman of a literary turn, who had been 
with difficulty persuaded to take a hand ; and who, in his excess 
of candor, declared, that he thought there was no harm in un- 
bending the mind now and then, after serious studies, in recrea- 
tions of that kind ! She could not bear to have her noble occu- 
pation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in that 
light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the 
world to do, — and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards, 
over a book. 

Pope was her favorite author: his Rape of the Lock her 
favorite work. She once did me the favor to play over with me 
(with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem ; 
and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and in what points 
it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustrations were 
apposite and poignant ; and I had the pleasure of sending the 
substance of them to Mr. Bowles ; but I suppose they came too 
late to be inserted among his ingenious notes upon that author. 

Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love ; but whist had 
engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy and 
specious, and likely to allure young persons. The uncertainty and 
quick shifting of partners — a thing which the constancy of whist 
abhors ; — the dazzling supremacy and regal investiture of Spa 
dille — absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of 
whist, where his crown and garter gave him no proper power 
above his brother-nobility of the Aces ; — the giddy vanity, so 
taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone ; above all, the 
overpowering attractions of a Sans Prendre Vole, — to the triumph 
of which there is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, in the 
contingencies of whist ; — all these, she would say, make quadrille 
a game of captivation to the young and enthusiastic. But whist 
was the solider game : that was her word. It was a long meal : 
not, like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might 
co-extend in duration with an evening. They gave time to form 
rooted friendships, to cultivate steady enmities. She despised the 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. 43 

chance-started, capricious, and ever-fluctuating alliances of the 
other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, reminded 
her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian states, 
depicted by Machiavel : perpetually changing postures and con- 
nexions ; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow ; kissing 
and scratching in a breath ; — but the wars of whist were com- 
parable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational, antipathies of 
the great French and English nations. 

A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her fa- 
vorite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in crib- 
bage — nothing superfluous. No flushes— -that most irrational of 
all pleas that a reasonable being can set up : — that any one should 
claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and 
color, without reference to the playing of the game, or the indi- 
vidual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves ! She held 
this to be a solecism ; as pitiful an ambition at cards as allitera- 
tion is in authorship. She despised superficiality, and looked 
deeper than the color of things. Suits were soldiers, she would 
say, and must have an uniformity of array to distinguish them : 
but what should we say to a foolish squire, who should claim a 
merit from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets, that never 
were to be marshalled — never to take the field ? — She even wished 
that whist were more simple than it is ; and, in my mind, would 
have stripped it of some appendages, which, in the state of human 
frailty, may be venially and even commendably, allowed of. She 
saw no reason for the deciding of the trump by the turn of the 
card. Why not one suit always trumps ? — Why two colors, when 
the mark of the suits would have sufficiently distinguished them 
without it ? — 

" But the eye, my dear Madam, is agreeably refreshed with the 
variety. Man is not a creature of pure reason — he must have 
his senses delightfully appealed to. We see it in Roman Catholic 
countries, where the music and the paintings draw in many to 
worship, whom your quaker spirit of unsensualising would have 
kept out. — You yourself have a pretty collection of paintings — 
but confess to me, whether, walking in your gallery at Sandham, 
among those clear Vandykes, or among the Paul Potters in the 
ante-room, you ever felt your bosom glow with an elegant delight, 



44 ELIA r 

at all comparable to that you have it in your power to experience 
most evenings over a well-arranged assortment of the court cards ? 
— the pretty antic habits, like heralds in a procession — the gay 
triumph-assuring scarlets — the contrasting deadly-killing sables— 
the * hoary majesty of spades' — Pam in all his glory ! — 

" All these might be dispensed with ; and with their naked 
names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very well 
pictureless. But the beauty of cards would be extinguished for 
ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, they must 
degenerate into mere gambling. Imagine a dull deal board, or 
drum head, to spread them on, instead of that nice verdant carpet 
(next to nature's), fittest arena for those courtly combatants to 
play their gallant jousts and tourneys in ! — Exchange those deli- 
cately-turned ivory markers — (work of Chinese artist, unconscious 
of their symbol, — or as profanely slighting their true application 
as the arrantest Ephesian journeyman that turned out those little 
shrines for the goddess) — exchange them for little bits of leather 
(our ancestor's money) or chalk and a slate ! " — 

The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my 
logic, and to her approbation of my arguments on her favorite 
topic that evening, I have always fancied myself indebted for the 
legacy of a curious cribbage-board, made of the finest Sienna 
marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I 
have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence : — 
this, and a trifle of five hundred pounds, came to me at her 
death. 

The former bequest (which I do not least value) 1 have kept 
with religious care ; though she herself, to confess a truth, was 
never greatly taken with cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar 
game, I have heard her say, — disputing with her uncle, who was 
very partial to it. She could never heartily bring her mouth to pro- 
nounce " Go " — or " That's ago." She called it an ungrammati- 
cal game. The pegging teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a 
rubber (a guinea stake), because she would not take advantage 
of the turn-up knave, which would have given it her, but which 
she must have claimed by the disgraceful tenure of declaring 
" two for his heels" There is something extremely genteel in 
this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentlewoman born. 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. 45 

Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons, 
though she would ridicule the pedantry of the terms — such as 
pique — repique — the capot — they savored (she thought) of affec- 
tation. But games for two, or even three, she never greatly cared 
for. She loved the quadrate, or square. She would argue thus : 
— Cards are warfare : the ends are gain, with glory. But cards 
are war, in disguise of a sport ; when single adversaries en- 
counter, the ends proposed are too palpable. By themselves, it is 
too close a fight ; with spectators, it is not much bettered. No 
looker-on can be interested, except for a bet, and then it is a mere 
affair of money ; he cares not for your luck sympathetically, or for 
your play. — Three are still w T orse ; a mere naked war of every man 
against every man, as in cribbage, without league or alliance ; 
or a rotation of petty and contradictory interests, a succession of 
heartless leagues, and not much more hearty infractions of them, 
as in tradrille. — But in square games (she meant whist), all that is 
possible to be attained in card-playing is accomplished. There 
are the incentives of profit with honor, common to every species 
— though the latter can be but very imperfectly enjoyed in those 
other games, where the spectator is only feebly a participator. 
But the parties in whist are spectators and principals too. They 
are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not wanted. He 
is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence. Whist abhors 
neutrality, or interests beyond its sphere. You glory in some 
surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold — or even 
an interested — bystander witnesses it, but because your partner 
sympathizes in the contingency. You win for two. You triumph 
for two. Two are exalted. Two again are mortified ; which 
divides their disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by taking off 
the invidiousness) your glories. Two losing to two are better 
reconciled, than one to one in that close butchery. The hostile 
feeling is weakened by multiplying the channels. War becomes 
a civil game. — By such reasonings as these the old lady was ac- 
customed to defend her favorite pastime. 

No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any game, 
where chance entered into the composition, for nothing. Chance, 
she would argue — and here again admire the subtlety of her 
conclusion; — chance is nothing, but where something else depends 



46 ELIA. 

upon it. It is obvious that cannot he glory. What rational cause 
of exultation could it give to a man to turn up size ace a hundred 
times together by himself? or before spectators, where no stake 
was depending ? — Make a lottery of a hundred thousand tickets 
with but one fortunate number — and what possible principle of 
our nature, except stupid wonderment, could it gratify to gain 
that number as many times successively, without a prize ? — 
Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in backgammon, 
where it was not played for money. She called it foolish, and 
those people idiots, who were taken with a lucky hit under such 
circumstances. Games of pure skill were as little to her fancy. 
Played for a stake, they were a mere system of over-reaching. 
Played for glory they were a mere setting of one man's wit, — 
his memory, or combination-faculty rather — against another's ; 
like a mock-engagement at a review, bloodless and profitless. 
She could not conceive a game wanting the sprightly infusion of 
chance, the handsome excuses of good fortune. Two people 
playing at chess in a corner of a room, whilst whist was stirring 
in the centre, would inspire her with insufferable horror and 
ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of Castles, and Knights, the 
imagery of the board, she would argue (and I think in this case 
justly), were entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard 
head-contests can in no instance ally with the fancy. They 
reject form and color. A pencil and dry-slate (she used to say) 
were the proper arena for such combatants. 

To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad 
passions, she would retort, that man is a gaming animal. He 
must be always trying to get the better in something or other : — 
that this passion can scarcely be more safely expended than upon 
a game at cards : that cards are a temporary illusion ; in truth, 
a mere drama ; for we do but play at being mightily concerned, 
where a few idle shillings are at stake, yet, during the illusion, we 
are as mightily concerned as those whose stake is crowns and 
kingdoms. They are a sort of dream-fighting ; much ado ; great 
battling, and little bloodshed ; mighty means for disproportioned 
ends ; quite as diverting, and a great deal more innoxious, than 
many of those more serious games of life, which men play, with- 
out esteeming them to be such. 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. 47 

With great deference to the old lady's judgment on these mat- 
ters I think I have experienced some moments in my life, when 
playing at cards for nothing has even been agreeable. When I 
am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for the 
cards, and play a game at piquet for love with my cousin Bridget 
—Bridget Elia. 

I grant there is something sneaking in it ; but with a tooth- 
ache, or a sprained ankle, — when you are subdued and humble, 
— you are glad to put up with an inferior spring of action. 

There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick whist. 

I grant it is not the highest style of man — I deprecate the 
manes of Sarah Battle — she lives not, alas ! to whom I should 
apologise. 

At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to, 
come in as something admissible. — I love to get a tierce or a 
quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an in- 
ferior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me. 

That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her) — 
(dare I tell thee how foolish I am ?) — I wished it might have 
lasted for ever, though we gained nothing, and lost nothing, though 
it was a mere shade of play : I would be content to go on in that 
idle folly for ever. The pipkin should be ever boiling, that was 
to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget was 
doomed to apply after the game was over : and, as I do not much 
relish appliances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget and I 
should be ever playing. ^ 



48 ELIA. 



A CHAPTER ON EARS. 



I have no ear. — 

Mistake me not, reader — nor imagine that I am by nature des- 
titute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and 
(architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capi- 
tal. Better my mother had never borne me. — I am, I think, 
rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits ; 
and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the 
mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets — 
those indispensable side-intelligencers. 

Neither have I incurred, or done anything to incur, with Defoe, 
that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon 
assurance — to feel " quite unabashed," and at ease upon that 
article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory ; nor, if 
I read them aright, is it within the compass of my destiny, that 
I ever should be. 

When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand 
me to mean— -for music. To say that this heart never melted at 
the concord of sweet sounds, would be a foul self-libel. " Water 
parted from the sea " never fails to move it strangely. So does 
" In infancy." But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord 
(the old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a 
gentlewoman — the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appella- 
tion — the sweetest — why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S , 

once the blooming Fanny Weatheral of the Temple — who had 
power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in 
his long coats ; and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with 
a passion, that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that absorb- 



A CHAPTER ON EARS. 49 

ing sentiment which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and 
subdue his nature quite for Alice W n. 

I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But 
organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising 
" God save the King" all my life; whistling and humming of it 
over to myself in solitary corners ; and am not yet arrived, they 
tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia 
never been impeached. 

I am not without suspicion, that I have an undeveloped faculty 
of music within me. For thrumming, in my wild way, on my 
friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an 
adjoining parlor, — on his return he was pleased to say, " he thought 
it could not be the maid !" On his first surprise at hearing the 
keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dream- 
ing ofme, his suspicions had lighted on Jenny, But a grace, 
snatched from a superior refinement, soon convinced him that 
some being — technically perhaps deficient, but higher informed 
from a principle common to all the fine arts — had swayed the 
keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her (less cultivated) enthu- 
siasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention this as a 
proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any view of dis- 
paraging Jenny. 

Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I 
taken some pains) what a note in music is ; or how one note 
should differ from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish 
a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the thorough-bass I 
contrive to guess at, from its being supereminently harsh and dis- 
agreeable. I tremble, however, for my misapplication of the 
simplest terms of that which I disclaim. While I profess my 
ignorance, I scarce know what to say I am ignorant of. I hate, 
perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and adagio stand in the like 
relation of obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as conjuring 
as Baralvpton. 

It is hard to stand alone in an age like this, — (constituted to the 
quick and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I 
verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled 
upon the gamut) to remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to 
the magic influences of an art, which is said to have such an 
5 



50 EL1A. 

especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions. 
— Yet, rather than break the candid current of my confessions, I 
must avow to you, that I have received a great deal more pain 
than pleasure from this so cried-up faculty. 

I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's 
hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than 
midsummer madness. But those unconnected, unset sounds are 
nothing to the measured malice of music. The ear is passive to 
those single strokes ; willingly enduring stripes while it hath no 
task to con. To music it cannot be passive. It will strive — 
mine at least will — 'spite of its inaptitude, to thread the maze ; 
like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon hieroglyphics. I 
have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inex- 
plicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the 
crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds which I w*as not 
obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, 
fruitless, barren attention! I take refuge in the unpretending 
assemblage of honest common-life sounds ; — and the purgatory 
of the Enraged Musician becomes my paradise. 

I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of 
the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in 
the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience !) im- 
moveable, or affecting some faint emotion — till (as some have 
said, that our occupations in the next world will be but a shadow 
of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold 
Theatre in Hades, where some of the forms of the earthly one 
should be kept up, with none of the enjoyment ; or like that 

Party in a parlor 

All silent, and all damned. 

Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as 
they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehensions. 
Words are something ; but to be exposed to an endless battery of 
mere sounds ; to be long a dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of 
roses ; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort ; to pile honey 
upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious 
sweetness ; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep 



A CHAPTER ON EARS 61 

pace with it ; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make 
the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, and be obliged 
to supply the verbal matter ; to invent extempore tragedies to 
answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime— 
these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series 
of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. 

I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced 
something vastly lulling and agreeable : — afterwards followeth the 
languor and the oppression. — Like that disappointing book in 
Patmos; or, like the comings on of melancholy, described by 
Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches : — " Most 
pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given to walk alone in 
some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, 
and to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which 
shall affect him most, amabilis insania, and mentis gratissimus 
error, A most incomparable delight to build castles in the air, 
to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, 
which they suppose, and strongly imagine, they act, or that they see 
done. — So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole 
days and nights without sleep, even whole years in such contem- 
plations, and fantastical meditations, which are like so many 
dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them — winding and un- 
winding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their 
humors, until at the last the scene turns upon a sudden, and 
they being now habituated to such meditations and solitary places, 
can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and dis- 
tasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, sulrusticus pudor, 
discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden 
and they can think of nothing else ; continually suspecting, no 
sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy 
seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal 
object to their minds; which now, by no means, no labor, no 
persuasions, they can avoid, they cannot be rid of, they cannot 
resist." 

Something like this " scene turning " I have experienced at 
the evening parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend 
Nov ; who, by ihe aid of a capital organ, himself the most 



52 ELIA. 

finished of players, converts his drawing-room into a chapel, his 
week days into Sundays, and these latter into minor heavens.* 

When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, 
which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the 
side aisles of the dim Abbey, some five-and-thirty years since, 
waking a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my 
young apprehension — (whether it be that, in which the Psalmist, 
weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's 
wings — or that oilier, which, with a like measure of sobriety and 
pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse 
his mind) — a holy calm pervadeth me. — I am for the time 

rapt above earth, 

And possess joys not promised at my birth. 

But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul 
prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her 
capacity to receive, — impatient to overcorne her " earthly " with his 
" heavenly," — still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves 
and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German 
ocean, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin-seated, ride 
those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant Tritons, Bach, 
Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up 
would but plunge me again in the deeps, — I stagger under the 
weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wits' end ; — clouds, 
as of frankincense, oppress me — priests, altars,* censers, dazzle 
before me — the genius of his religion hath me in her toils — a 
shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, 
so ingenuous — he is Pope, — and by him sits, like as in the anomaly 
of dreams, a she-Pope too, — tricoroneted like himself! — I am 
converted, and yet a Protestant ; — at once malleus hereticornm, 
and myself grand heresiarch : or three heresies centre in my 
person : — I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus — Gog and Magog 
— what not ? — till the coming in of the friendly supper-tray dissi- 
pates the figment, and a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which 
chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me 
to the rationalities of a purer faith ; and restores to me the genuine 
vnterrifying aspects of my pleasant-countenanced host and hostess. 

* I have been there, and still would go; 
'Tis like a little heaven below. — Dr. Watts 



ALL FOOLS' DAY. 53 



ALL FOOLS' DAY, 



WWWWWW»V< 



The compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry 
first of April to us all ! 

Many happy returns of this day to you — and you — and you, 
Sir — nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. 
Do not we know one another ? what need of ceremony among 
friends ? we have all a touch of that same — you understand me — 
a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as 
this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am none 
of those sneakers. I am free of the corporation, and care not who 
knows it. He that meets me in the forest to-day, shall meet with 
no wise-acre, I can tell him. Stultus sum. Translate me that, 
and take the meaning of it to yourself for your pains. What ! 
man, we have four quarters of the globe on our side, at the least 
computation. 

Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry — we will drink no 
wise, melancholy, politic port on this day — and let us troll the 
catch of Amiens— due ad me — due ad me — how goes it ? 

Here shall he see 
Gross fools as he. 

Now would I give a trifle to know historically and authentically, 
who was the greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly 
give him in a bumper. Marry, of the present breed, I think I 
could without much difficulty name you the party. 

Remove your cap a little further, if you please : it hides my 
bauble. And now each man bestride his hobby, and dust away 
his bells to what tune he pleases. I wiT give you, for my part, 

The crazy old church clock, 

And the bewildered chimes. 



54 ELIA. 

Good master Empedocles, you are welcome. It is long since 
you went a salamander-gathering down JEtna. Worse than sam- 
phire-picking by some odds. 'Tis a mercy your worship did not 
singe your mustachios. 

Ha ! Cleombrotus ! and what salads in faith did you light upon 
at the bottom of the Mediterranean ! You were founder, I take 
it, of the disinterested sect of the Calenturists. 

Gebir, my old free-mason, and prince of plasterers at Babel, : 
bring in your trowel, most Ancient Grand ! You have claim to 
a seat here at my right hand, as patron of the stammerers. You 
left your work, if I remember Herodotus correctly, at eight 
hundred million toises, or thereabout, above the level of the sea. 
Bless us, what a long bell you must have pulled, to call your top 
workmen to their nunchion on the low grounds of Shinar. Or did 
you send up your garlic and onions by a rocket ? I am a rogue if 
I am not ashamed to show you our Monument on Fish-street Hill, 
after your altitudes. Yet we think it somewhat. 

What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears ? — cry, baby, put 
its finger in its eye, it shall have another globe, round as an 
orange, pretty moppet ! 

Mister Adams — —'odso, I honor your coat — pray do us the 
favor to read to us that sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slip- 
slop — the twenty. and second in your portmanteau there — on 
Female Incontinence — the same — it will come in most irre- 
levantly and impertinently seasonable to the time of the day. 

Good Master Raymund Lully, you look wise. Pray correct 
that error. 

Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, or a 
paradox. We will have nothing said or done syllogistically this 
day. Remove those logical forms, waiter, that no gentleman 
break the tender shins of his apprehension stumbling across them. 

Master Stephen, you are late. — Ha ! Cokes, is it you ? — Ague- 
cheek, my dear knight, let me pay my devoir to you. — Master 
Shallow, your worship's poor servant to command. — Master 
Silence, I will ase few words with you. — Slender, it shall go hard 
if I edge not you in somewhere. — You six will engross all the 
poor wit of the company to-day. — I know it, I know it. 

Ha! honest R , my fine old Librarian of Ludgate, time 



ALL FOOLS' DAY. 55 

out of mind, art thou here again ? Bless thy doublet, it is not 
over-new, threadbare as thy stories : — what dost thou flitting about 
the world at this rate ? — Thy customers are extinct, defunct, bed- 
rid, have ceased to read long ago. — -Thou goest still among them, 
seeing if, peradventure, thou canst hawk a volume or two. — Good 
Granville S , thy last patron is flown. 

King Pandion, he is dead, 

All thy friends are lapt in lead. — 

Nevertheless, noble R , come in, and take your seat here, 

between Armado and Quisada ; for in true courtesy, in gravity, 
in fantastic smiling to thyself, in courteous smiling upon others, in 
the goodly ornature of well-apparelled speech, and the commenda- 
tion of wise sentences, thou art nothing inferior to those accom- 
plished Dons of Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me for 
ever, when I forget thy singing the song of Macheath, which de- 
clares that he might be happy with either, situated between those 
two ancient spinsters — when I forget the inimitable formal love 
which thou didst make, turning now to the one, and now to the 
other, with that Malvolian smile — as if Cervantes, not Gay, had 
written it for his hero ; and as if thousands of periods must 
revolve, before the mirror of courtesy could have given his invidi- 
ous preference between a pair of so goodly-propertied and merito- 
rious-equal damsels. * * ***** 

To descend from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fool's 
Banquet beyond its appropriate day, — for I fear the second gf 
April is not many hours distant — in sober verity I will confess a 
truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool — as naturally, as if I were 
of kith and kin to him. When a child, with child-like apprehen- 
sions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those 
Parables — not guessing at the involved wisdom — I had more 
yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon 
the sand, than I entertained for his more cautious neighbor ; I 
grudged at the hard censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that 
kept his talent ; and — prizing their simplicity beyond the more 
provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness 
of their competitors — I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to 
a tendre, for those five thoughtless virgins. — I have never made an 



56 • EL1A. 

acquaintance since, that lasted ; or a friendship, that answered ; 
with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their charac- 
ters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more 
laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the 
more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. 
I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants ; the 
security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word 
for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he 
who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much 
worse matter in his composition. It is observed, that " the fool- 
isher the fowl or fish, — woodcocks, — dotterels, — cod's-heads, &c, 
the finer the flesh thereof/ 5 and what are commonly the world's 
received fools, but such whereof the world is not worthy? and 
what have been some of the kindliest patterns of our species, but 
so many darlings of absurdity, minions of the goddess, and her 
white boys ? — Reader, if you wrest my words beyond their fair 
construction, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool. 



A QUAKERS' MEETING. 57 



A QUAKERS' MEETING. 



Still-born Silence ! thou that art 

Flood-gate of the deeper heart ! 

Offspring of a heavenly kind ! 

Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind ! 

Secrecy's confidant, and he 

Who makes religion mystery ! 

Admiration's speaking'st tongue ! 

Leave, thy desert shades among, 

Reverend hermits' hallow'd cells, 

Where retired devotion dwells ! 

With thy enthusiasms come, 

Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb !* 

Reader, would'st thou know what true peace and quiet mean ; 
would'st thou find a refuge from the noises and clamors of the 
multitude ; would'st thou enjoy at once solitude and society ; 
would'st thou possess the depth of thy own spirit in stillness, 
without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species ; 
would'st thou be alone, and yet accompanied ; solitary, yet not 
desolate ; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in counte- 
nance ; a unit in aggregate ; a simple in composite : — -come with 
me into a Quakers' Meeting. 

Dost thou love silence deep as that " before the winds were 
made ?" go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the pro- 
fundities of the earth ; shut not up thy casements ; nor pour wax 
into the little cells of thy ears, with little faith'd self-mistrusting 
Ulysses. — Retire with me into a Quakers' Meeting. 

For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his 
peace, it is commendable ; but for a multitude, it is great 
mastery. 

* From "Poems of all Sorts," by Richard Fleckno, 1653. 



5S ELIA 

What is the stillness of the desert, compared with this place ? 
what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes ? — here the goddess 
reigns and revels. — " Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do 
not with their inter-confounding uproars more augment the brawl 
■ — nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds — 
than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and 
rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too 
hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a 
positive more and less ; and closed eyes would seem to obscure 
the great obscurity of midnight. 

There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. 
By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The 
perfect is that which he can sometimes atta'n in crowds, but no- 
where so absolutely as in a Quakers' Meeting,— Those first her- 
mits did certainly understand this principle, when they retired 
into Egyptian solitudes, not singly but in shoals, to enjoy one 
another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his 
brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In 
secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through 
a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by — say, a wife — he, 
or she, too (if that be probable), reading another, without inter- 
ruption, or oral communication ? — can there be no sympathy 
without the gabble of words ? — away with this inhuman, shy, sin- 
gle, shade and cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master 
Zimmermann, a sympathetic solitude. 

To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral, 
time-stricken ; 

Or under hanging mountains, 
Or by the fall of fountains ; 

is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those enjoy, 
who come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted 
solitude. This is the loneliness " to be felt." — The Abbey 
Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, 
as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here 
are no tombs, no inscriptions, 



-Sands, ignoble things, 



Dropt from the ruined sides of kings — 



A QUAKERS' MEETING. 09 

but here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into the 
fore-ground — Silence — eldest of things — language of old Night — 
primitive Discourser — to which the insolent decays of moulder- 
ing grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may 
say, unnatural progression. 

How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, 
Looking tranquillity \ 

Nothing-plotting, naught-caballing, unmischievous synod ! con- 
vocation without intrigue ! parliament without debate ! what a 
lesson dost tKou read to council, and to consistory ! — if my pen 
treat of you lightly — as haply it will wander — yet my spirit hath 
gra r ely felt the wisdom of your custom, when sitting among you 
in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would rather con- 
firm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your beginnings, 
and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. I have 
witnessed that, which brought before my eyes your heroic tran- 
quillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the 
insolent soldiery, republican or rcyalist, sent to molest you- — for 
ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the outcast and off- 
scouring of church and presbytery. I have seen the reeling sea- 
ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle, with the avowed 
intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the 
place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among 
ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remember Penn before his 
accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in 
spirit, as he tells us, and " the Judge and the Jury became as 
dead men under his feet." 

Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend 
to you, above all church-narratives, to read Sewel's History of 
the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the Journals of 
Fox and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affect- 
ing than anything you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. 
Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no 
suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious 
spirit. You will here read the true story of that much-injured, 
ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by- word in your mouth), 
— James Nay lor : what dreadful sufferings, with what patience, 



60 ELIA. 

he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue with red- 
hot irons, without a murmur ; and with what strength of mind, 
when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatised for 
blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce 
his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his 
first grounds, and be a Quaker still ! — so different from the prac- 
tice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they 
apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough 
from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation 
of some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not 
implicated. 

Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart ; and love the 
early Quakers. 

How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept 
to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted 
formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have 
seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove sate visibly 
brooding. Others again I have watched, when my thoughts 
should have been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect 
nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the dispo- 
sition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial 
workings. If the spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, 
at least they make few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly 
are not, in their preaching. It is seldom indeed 4hat you shall 
see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then 
a trembling, female, generally ancient; voice is heard — you can- 
not guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds — with a low, 
buzzing musical sound, laying out a few words which "she 
thought might suit the condition of some present," with a quaking 
diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that anything 
of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of 
tenderness, and a restraining modesty. The men, for what I have 
observed; speak seldomer. 

i Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of 
the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as 
Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced " from head to foot 
equipt in iron mail." His frame was of iron too. But he was 
malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit — I dare not 



A QUAKERS' MEETING. 61 

say of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were unutter- 
able ; he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the 
strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail ; his joints all 
seemed loosening : it was a figure to set off against Paul Preach- 
ing ; the words he uttered were few and sound ; he was evidently 
resisting his will — keeping down his own word-wisdom with more 
mighty effort, than the world's orators strain for theirs. " He had 
been a wit in his youth/ 5 he told us, with expressions of a sober 
remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun 
to wear away, that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to 
recall the striking incongruity of the confession — understanding 
the term in its worldly acceptation — with the frame and physiog- 
nomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared 
away the Levities — the Jocos Risusque — faster than the Loves 
fled the face of Dis at Enna. By wit, even in his youth, I will 
be sworn he understood something far within the limits of an 
allowable liberty. 

More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word hav- 
ing been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away 
with a sermon not made with hands. You have been in the 
milder caverns of Trophonius ; or as in some den, where that 
fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, that un- 
ruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have 
bathed with stillness. O when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired 
to sickness of the j anglings and nonsense-noises of the world, 
what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself, for a quiet 
half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the 
gentle Quakers ! 

Their garb and stillness conjoined, present a uniformity, tran- 
quil and herd-like — as in the pasture — " forty feeding like one." 

The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving 
a soil ; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the 
absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when 
they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening 
the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United 
Kingdom, they show like tioops of the Shining Ones. 



62 ELIA. 



THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 



My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. 
Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have sup- 
plied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In every- 
thing that relates to science^ I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind 
the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among 
the franklins, or country gentlemen, in king John's days. I know 
less geography than a school-boy of six weeks' standing. To me 
a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not 
know whereabout Africa merges into Asia ; whether Ethiopia lie 
in one or other of those great divisions ; nor can form the remot- 
est conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Die- 
men's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear 
friend in the first-named of these two Terrae Incognitas. I have 
no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or 
Charles's Wain ; the place of any star ; or the name of any of 
them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness — and if 
the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appear- 
ance in the West, J verily believe, that, while all the world were 
gasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterri- 
fied, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history 
and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot 
help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study ; but I never 
deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I 
have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies ; and 
sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first, in 
my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, 
and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great pains-taking, 
got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but 



THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 63 

gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquaint- 
ed with the modern languages ; and, like a better man than my. 
self, have " small Latin and less Greek." I am a stranger to the 
shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers — not 
from the circumstance of my being town-born — for I should have 
brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I 
first seen it " on Devon's leafy shores," — and am no less at a loss 
among purely town-objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes. 
Not that I affect ignorance — but my head has not many mansions, 
nor spacious ; and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet 
curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder 
how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the 
world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, 
a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce 
be found out, in mixed company ; everybody is so much more 
ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your ac- 
quisitions. But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling. The truth 
will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being 
left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed 
man that does not know me. I lately got into a dilemma of this 
sort. 

In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgate and Shackle- 
well, the coach stopped to take up a staid-looking gentleman, 
about the wrong side of thirty, who was giving his parting direc- 
tions (while the steps were adjusting), in a tone of mild authority, 
to a tall youth, who seemed to be neither his clerk, his son, nor 
his servant, but something partaking of all three. The youth 
was dismissed, and we drove on. As we were the sole passen- 
gers, he naturally enough addressed his conversation to me ; and 
we discussed the merits of the fare, the civility and punctuality 
of the driver ; the circumstance of an opposition coach having 
been lately set up, with the probabilities of its success — to all 
which I was enabled to return pretty satisfactory answers, having 
been drilled into this kind of etiquette by some years' daily prac- 
tice of riding to and fro in the stage aforesaid — when he suddenly 
alarmed me by a startling question, whether I had seen the show 
of prize cattle that morning in Smithfield ? Now as I had not 
seen it, and do not greatly care for such sort of exhibitions, I was 



64 ELIA. 

obliged to return a cold negative. He seemed a little mortified, 
as well as astonished, at my declaration, as (it appeared) he was 
just come fresh from the sight, and doubtless had hoped to com- 
pare notes on the subject. However, he assured me that I had 
lost a fine treat, as it far exceeded the show of last year. We 
were now approaching Norton Falgate, when the sight of some 
shop-goods ticketed freshened him up into a dissertation upon the 
cheapness of cottons this spring. I was now a little in heart, as 
the nature of my morning avocations had brought me into some 
sort of familiarity with the raw material ; and I was surprised to 
find how eloquent I was becoming on the state of the India mar- 
ket — when, presently, he dashed my incipient vanity to the earth 
at once, by inquiring whether I had ever made any calculation 
as to the value of the rental of all the retail shops in London. 
Had he asked of me, what song the Sirens sang, or what name 
Achilles assumed when he hid himself among the women, I 
might, with Sir Thomas Browne, have hazarded a " wide solu- 
tion. 5 '* My companion saw my embarrassment, and, the alms- 
houses beyond Shoreditch just coming in view, with great good- 
nature and dexterity shifted his conversation to the subject of 
public charities ; which led to the comparative merits of provision 
for the poor in past and present times, with observations on the 
old monastic institutions, and charitable orders ; but, finding me 
rather dimly impressed with some glimmering notions from old 
poetic associations, than strongly fortified with any speculations 
reducible to calculation on the subject, he gave the matter up ; 
and, the country beginning to open more and more upon us, as 
we approached the turnpike at Kingsland (the destined termina- 
tion of his journey), he put a home thrust upon me, in the most 
unfortunate position he could have chosen, by advancing some 
queries relative to the North Pole Expedition. While I was mut- 
tering out something about the Panorama of those strange regions 
(which I had actually seen), by way of parrying the question, 
the coach stopping relieved me from any further apprehensions. 
My companion getting out, left me in the comfortable possession 
of my ignorance ; and I heard him, as he went off, putting ques« 

* Urn Burial. 



THE OLD AND THE x\EW SCHOOLMASTER. 65 

tions to an outside passenger, who had alighted with him, regarding 
an epidemic disorder, that had been rife about Dalston ; and 
which my friend assured him had gone through five or six schools 
in that neighborhood. The truth now flashed upon me, that my 
companion was a schoolmaster ; and that the youth, whom he had 
parted from at our first acquaintance, must have been one of the 
bigger boys, or the usher. He was evidently a kind-hearted 
man, who did not seem so much desirous of provoking discussion 
by the questions which he put, as of obtaining information at any 
rate. It did not appear that he took any interest, either, in such 
kind of inquiries, for their own sake ; but that he was in some 
way bound to seek for knowledge. A greenish-colored coat, 
which he had on, forbade me to surmise that he was a clergyman. 
The adventure gave birth to some reflections on the difference 
between persons of his profession in past and present times. 

Rest to the souls of those fine old Pedagogues ; the breed, long 
since extinct, of the Lilys, and the Linacres : who believing that 
all learning was contained in the languages which they taught, 
and despising every other acquirement as superficial and useless, 
came to their task as to a sport ! Passing from infancy to age, 
they dreamed away all their days as in a grammar-school. Re- 
volving in a perpetual cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, 
and prosodies ; renewing constantly the occupations which had 
charmed their studious childhood ; rehearsing continually the 
part of the past ; life must have slipped from them at last like 
one day. They were always in their first garden, reaping har- 
vests of their golden time, among their Flori and their Spici- 
legia ; in Arcadia still, but kings ; the ferule of their sway not 
much harsher, but of like dignity with that mild sceptre attributed 
to king Basileus ; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela and 
their Philoclea ; with the occasional duncery of some untoward 
tyro, serving for a refreshing interlude of a Mopsa, or a clown 
Damoetas ! 

With what a savor doth the Preface to Colet's, or (as it is 
sometimes called) Paul's Accidence, set forth ! " To exhort 
every man to the learning of grammar, that intendeth to attain 
the understanding of the tongues, wherein is contained a great 
treasury of wisdom and knowledge, it would seem but vain and 
6 



66 ELIA. 

lost labor ; for so much as it is known, that nothing can surely 
be ended, whose beginning is either feeble or faulty ; and no 
building be perfect whereas the foundation and groundwork is 
ready to fall, and unable to uphold the burden of the frame." 
How well doth this stately preamble (comparable with those 
which Milton commendeth as " having been the usage to prefix 
to some solemn law, then first promulgated by Solon, or Lycur- 
gus") correspond with and illustrate that pious zeal for conformity, 
expressed in a succeeding clause, which would fence about gram- 
mar-rules with the severity of faith articles ! — " as for the diver- 
sity of grammars, it is well profitably taken away by the king 
majesties wisdom, who foreseeing 'the inconvenience, and favora- 
bly providing the remedie, caused one kind of grammar by sundry 
learned men to be diligently drawn, and so to be set out, only 
everywhere to be taught for the use of learners, and for the 
hurt in changing of schoolmaisters." What & gusto in that which 
follows : " wherein it is profitable that he [the pupil] can orderly 
decline his noun, and his verb." His noun ! 

The fine dream is fading away fast ; and the least concern of 
a teacher in the present day is to inculcate grammar-rules. 

The modern schoolmaster is expected to know a little of every- 
thing, because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of 
anything. He must be superficially, if I may so say, omniscient. 
He is to know something of pneumatics ; of chemistry ; of what- 
ever is curious, or proper to excite the attention of the youthful 
mind ; an insight into mechanics is desirable, with a touch of 
statistics; the quality of soils, &c, botany, the constitution of his 
country, cum multis aliis. You may get a notion of some part of 
his expected duties by consulting the famous Tractate on Educa- 
tion addressed to Mr. Hartlib. 

All these things — these, or the desire of them — he is expected 
to instil, not by set lessons from professors, which he may charge 
in the bill, but at school-intervals, as he walks the streets, or 
saunters through green fields (those natural instructors), with his 
pupils. The least part of what is expected from him, is to be 
done in school-hours. He must insinuate knowledge at the 
mollia temporafandi. He must seize every occasion — the season 
of the year — the time of the day — a passing cloud — a rainbow — 



THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 67 

a waggon of hay — a regiment of soldiers going by — to inculcate 
something useful. He can receive no pleasure from a casual 
glimpse of Nature, but must catch at it as an object of instruc- 
tion. He must interpret beauty into the picturesque. He can- 
not relish a beggar-man, or a gipsy, for thinking of the suitable 
improvement. Nothing comes to him, not spoiled by the sophis- 
ticating medium of moral uses. The Universe — that Great Book, 
as it has been called — is to him indeed, to all intents and pur- 
poses, a book, out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to 
distasting school-boys. — Vacations themselves are none to him, he 
is only rather worse off than before ; for commonly he has some 
intrusive upper-boy fastened upon him at such times ; some cadet 
of a great family ; some neglected lump of nobility, or gentry ; 
that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr. 
Bartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon, or into the country, to a 
friend's house, or his favorite watering-place. Wherever he 
goes, this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and 
in his path, and in all his movements. He is boy-rid, sick of 
perpetual boy. 

Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates ; 
but they are unwholesome companions for grown people. The re- 
straint is felt no less on the one side, than on the other. — Even a 
child, that " plaything for an hour," tires always. The noises of 
children, playing their own fancies — as I now hearken to them by 
fits, sporting on the green before my window, while I am engaged 
in these grave speculations at my neat suburban retreat at Shackle- 
well — by distance made more sweet — inexpressibly take from 
the labor of my task. It is like writing to music. They seem 
to modulate my periods. They ought at least to do so — for in the 
voice of that tender age there is a kind of poetry, far unlike the 
harsh prose-accents of man's conversation. — I should but spoil 
their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by mingling 
in their pastime. 

I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very 
superior capacity to my own — not, if I know myself at all, from 
any considerations of jealousy or self-comparison, for the occa- 
sional communion with such minds has constituted the fortune and 
felicity of my life — but the habit of too constant intercourse with 



«8 ELIA. 

spirits above you, instead of raising you, keeps you down. Too 
frequent doses of original thinking from others, restrain what 
lesser portion of that faculty you may possess of your own. You 
get entangled in another man's mind, even as you lose yourself 
in another man's grounds. You are walking with a tall 
varlet, whose strides out-pace yours to lassitude. The con- 
stant operation of such potent agency would reduce me, I am 
convinced, to imbecility. You may derive thoughts from others ; 
your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, 
must be your own. Intellect may be imparted, but not each 
man's intellectual frame. — - 

As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged upward, as 
little (or rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted downwards 
by your associates. The trumpet does not more stun you by its 
loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility. 

Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a school- 
master ? — because we are conscious that he is not quite at his 
ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place, in the society of 
his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, 
and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours. He 
cannot meet you on the square. He wants a point given him, 
like an indifferent whist-player. He is so used to teaching, that 
he wants to be teaching you. One of these professors, upon my 
complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but 
methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly 
offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen 
in his seminary were taught to compose English themes. — The 
jests of a schoolmaster are coarse, or thin. They do not tell out 
of school. He is under the restraint of a formal or didactive hy- 
pocrisy in company, as a clergyman is under a moral one. He 
can no more let his intellect loose in society, than the other can 
his inclinations. — He is forlorn among his coevals ; his juniors 
cannot be his friends. . 

" I take blame to myself," said a sensible man of this profes- 
sion, writing to a friend respecting a youth who had quitted his 
school abruptly, " that your nephew was not more attached to me. 
But persons in my situation are more to be pitied, than can well 
be imagined. We are surrounded by young, and, consequently 



THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 69 

ardently affectionate hearts, but we can never hope to share an 
atom of their affections. The relation of master and scholar for- 
bids this. How pleasing this must he to you, how 1 envy your feel- 
ings ! my friends will sometimes say to me, when they see young 
men whom I have educated, return after some years' absence 
from school, their eyes shining with pleasure, while they shake 
hands with their old master, bringing a present of game to me, 
or a toy to my wife, and thanking me in the warmest terms for 
my care of their education. A holiday is begged for the boys ; 
the house is a scene of happiness ; I, only, am sad at heart. — This 
fine-spirited and warm-hearted youth, who fancies he repays his 
master with gratitude for the care of his boyish years — this young 
man — in the eight long years I watched over him with a parent's 
anxiety, never could repay me with one look of genuine feeling. 
He was proud, when I praised ; he was submissive, when I re- 
proved him ; but he did never love me — and what he now mis- 
takes for gratitude and kindness for me, is but the pleasant 
sensation, which all persons feel at revisiting the scenes of their 
boyish hopes and fears ; and the seeing on equal terms the man 
they were accustomed to look up to with reverence. My wife 
too," this interesting correspondent goes on to say, " my once 
darling Anna, is the wife of a schoolmaster. — When I married 
her — knowing that the wife of a schoolmaster ought to be a busy 
notable creature, and fearing that my gentle Anna would ill supply 
the loss of my dear bustling mother, just then dead, who never 
sat still, was in every part of the house in a moment, and whom 
I was obliged sometimes to threaten to fasten down in a chair, to 
save her from fatiguing herself to death — I expressed my fears 
that I was bringing her into a way of life unsuitable to her ; and 
she, who loved me tenderly, promised for my sake to exert her- 
self to perform the duties of her new situation. She promised, 
and she has kept her word. What wonders will not woman's love 
perform ? — My house is managed with a propriety and decorum 
unknown in other schools ; my boys are well fed, look healthy, 
and have every proper accommodation ; and all this performed 
with a careful economy, that never descends to meanness. But 
I have lost my gentle helpless Anna ! — When we sit down to en- 
joy an hour of repose after the fatigues of the day, I am compelled 



70 . KL1A. 

to listen to what have been her useful (and they are really useful) 
employments through the day, and what she proposes for her to- 
morrow's task. Her heart and her features are changed by the 
duties of her situation. To the boys she never appears other 
than the master's wife, and she looks up to me as the boys' master ; 
to whom all show of love and affection would be highly improper, 
and unbecoming the dignity of her situation and mine. Yet this 
my gratitude forbids me to hint to her. For my sake she sub- 
mitted to be this altered creature, and can I reproach her for it ?'' 
For the communication of this letter, I am indebted to my cousin 
Bridget. 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 71 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 



1 am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathizeth with 
all things ; I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy in anything. Those 
natural repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the 
French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — Religio Medici. 

That the author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the airy- 
stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural 
essences ; in whose categories of Being the possible took the up- 
per hand of the actual ; should have overlooked the impertinent 
individualities of such poor concretions as mankind, is not much 
to be admired. It is rather to be wondered at, that in the genus 
of animals he should have condescended to distinguish that spe- 
cies at all. For myself— earth-bound and fettered to the scene 
of my activities, — 

Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky, 

I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or in- 
dividual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent 
eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of 
taste or distaste ; or when once it becomes indifferent, it begins 
to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of preju- 
dices — made up of likings and dislikings — the veriest thrall to 
sympathies, apathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it 
may be said of me that I am a lover of my species. I can feel 
for all indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all equally. The 
more purely-English word that expresses sympathy, will better 
explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, w* 



72 ELIA. 

upon another account cannot be my mate or fellow. I cannot like 
all people alike.* 

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am 
obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot 
like me — and in truth. I never knew one of that nation who at- 
tempted to do it. There is something more plain and ingenuous 
in their mode of proceeding. We know one another at first 
sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under which 
mine must be content to rank), which in its constitution is es- 
sentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the sort of faculties I 
allude to, have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive. 
They have no pretences to much clearness or precision in their 
ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual 
wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They 
are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She 
presents no full front to them — a feature or side-face at the most. 
Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the 
utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game peradven- 

* I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of imperfect 
sympathies. To nations or classes of men there can be no direct antipathy. 
There may be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another in- 
dividual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met with 
my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meeting 
(who never saw one another before in their lives) and instantly fighting. 

-We by proof find there should be 



'Twixt man and man such an antipathy, 
That though he can show no just reason why 
For any former wrong or injury, 
Can neither find a blemish in his fame, 
Nor aught in face or feature justly blame, 
Can challenge or accuse him of no evil, 
Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil. 

The lines are from old Heywood's " Hierarchie of Angels," and he sub- 
joins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who attempted to 
assassinate a King Ferdinand of Spain, and being put to the rack could 
give no other reason for the deed but an inveterate antipathy which he had 
taken to the first sight of the King. 



The cause which to that act compell'd him 

Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him. 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 73 

ture — and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to 
run it down. The light that lights them is not steady and polar, 
but mutable and shifting : waxing, and again waning. Their 
conversation is accordingly. They will 4hrow out a random 
word in or out of season, and be content to let it pass for what it 
is worth. They cannot speak always as if they were upon their 
oath — but must be understood, speaking or writing, with some 
abatement. They seldom wait to mature a proposition, but e'en 
bring it to market in the green ear. They delight to impart their 
defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their full 
development. They are no systematizers, and would but err more 
by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive 
merely. The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) 
is constituted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born 
in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their 
growth — if, indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put together 
upon principles of clock-work. You never catch his mind in an 
undress. He never hints or suggests anything, but unlades his 
stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness. He brings his 
total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks it. His riches 
are always about him. He never stoops to catch a glittering 
something in your presence to share it with you, before he quite 
knows whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry halves 
to anything that he finds. He does not find, but bring. You 
never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His understand- 
ing is always at its meridian — you never see the first dawn, the 
early streaks. — He has no falterings of self-suspicion. Surmises, 
guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousnesses, partial 
illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in 
his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls 
upon him. Is he orthodox — he has no doubts. Is he an infidel 
— he has none either. Between the affirmative and the negative 
there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover with him« 
upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable 
argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make ex- 
cursions with him — for he sets you right. His taste never fluc- 
tuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or 
understand middle actions. There can be but a right and a 



74 UL1A. 

wrong. His conversation is as a book. His affirmations have 
the sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon the square with 
him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's 
country. " A healthy book !" — said one of his countrymen to 
me, who had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle, 
— " Did I catch rightly what you said ? I have heard of a man 
in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how 
that epithet can be properly applied to a book." Above all, you 
must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap 
an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with 
a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a 
print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was 
showing off to M*\ ****. After he had examined it minutely, I 
ventured to ask him how he liked my beauty (a foolish name it 
goes by among my friends) — when he very gravely assured me 
that " he had considerable respect for my character and talents'' 
(so he was pleased to say), " but had not given himself much 
thought about the degree of my personal pretensions." The mis- 
conception staggered me, but did not seem much to disconcert 
him. — Persons of this nation are particularly fond of affirming a 
truth — which nobody doubts. They do not so properly affirm, 
as annunciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love 
of truth (as if, like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all 
truth becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that con- 
tains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to be- 
come a subject of disputation. I was present not long^ince at a 
party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected ; 
and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British 
way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son — when 
four of them started up at once to inform me, that " that was im- 
possible, because he was dead." An impracticable wish, it 
seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has hit off this 
part of their character, namely, their love of truth, in his biting 
way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines the passage 
to the margin.* The tediousness of these people is certainly pro- 

* There are some people whq think they sufficiently acquit themselves, 
and entertain their company, with relating facts of no consequence, not at 
all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day: and 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 75 

voking. I wonder if they ever tire one another ? — In my early 
life I had a passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have 
sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with his country- 
men by expressing it. But I have always found that a true Scot 
resents your admiration of his compatriot, even more than he 
would your contempt of him. The latter he imputes to your 
" imperfect acquaintance with many of the words which he uses ;" 
and the same objection makes it a presumption in you to suppose 
that you can admire him. — Thompson they seem to have forgot- 
ten. Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven, for his 
delineation of Rory and his companion, upon their first introduc- 
tion to our metropolis. — Spea'k of Smollett as a great genius, and 
they will retort upon you Hume's History compared with Ms 
Continuation of it. What if the historian had continued Hum- 
phrey Clinker ? 

I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a 
piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with' which Stonehenge is 
in its nonage. They date beyond the pyramids. But I should not 
care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. 
I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their synagogues. 
Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off the story of 
Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate, on the 
one side, — of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on the 
other, between our and their fathers, must and ought, to affect the 
blood of the children. I cannot believe it can run clear and 
kindly yet ; or that a few fine words, such as candor, liberality, 
the light of a nineteenth century, can close up the breaches of so 
deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. He 
is least distasteful on 'Change — for the mercantile spirit levels all 
distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly confess 
that I do not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which 
has become so fashionable. The reciprocal endearments have, to 

this I have observed more frequently among the Scots than any other na- 
tion, who are very careful not to omit the minutest circumstances of time 
or place ; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the 
uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent and gesture peculiar to that 
country would bo hardly tolerable — Hints towards an Essay on Conver- 
sation. 



76 ELIA. 

me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not like 
to see the Church and Synagogue kissing and congeeing in 
awkward postures of an affected civility. If they are converted, 
why do they not come over to us altogether ? Why keep up a 
form of separation, when the life of it is fled ? If they can sit 
with us at table, why do they keck at our cookery ? I do not 
understand these half convertites. Jews christianizing — Christians 
judaizing — puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a 
more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit 

of the synagogue is essentially separative. B would have been 

more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. 

There is a fine scorn in his face, which nature meant to be of 

Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in spite of his 
proselytism. He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it breaks 
out, when he sings, " The Children of Israel passed through the 
Red Sea !" The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to 
him, and he rides over our necks in triumph. There is no mis- 
taking him. B has a strong expression of sense in his coun- 
tenance, and it is confirmed by his singing. The foundation of 
his vocal excellence is sense. He sings with understanding, as 
Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the Commandments, 
and give an appropriate character to each prohibition. His 
nation, in general, have not over-sensible countenances. How 
should they ? — but you seldom see a silly expression among them 
Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's visage. I never 
heard of an idiot being born among them. — Some admire the 
Jewish female-physiognomy. I admire it — but with trembling. 
Jael had those full dark inscrutable eyes. 

In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong 
traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards 
some of these faces — or rather masks — that have looked out 
kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. 
I love what Fuller beautifully calls — these " images of God cut 
in ebony. 55 But I should not like to associate with them, to share 
my meals and my good-nights with them — because they are 
black. 

I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I venerate the 
Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when 



IMPERFECT SYMPx\THIES. 77 

I meet any of their people in my path. When I am ruffled or 
disturbed by any occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a 
Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, anc 
taking off a load from the bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers 
(as Desdemona would say) " to live with them. 55 I am all over 
sophisticated — with humors, fancies, craving hourly sympathy 
I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, 
ambiguities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler 
taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. 
My appetites are too high for the salads which (according to 
Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto too excited 

To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse. 

The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return 
to a question put to them may be explained, I think, without the 
vulgar assumption, that they are more given to evasion and equi- 
vocating than other people. They naturally look to their words 
more carefully, and are more cautious of committing themselves. 
They have a peculiar character to keep up on this head. They 
stand in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law 
exempted from taking an oath. The custom of resorting to an 
oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious antiquity, 
is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce into the laxer sort of 
minds the notion of two kinds of truth — the one applicable to the 
solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common proceed- 
ings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience 
by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the 
shop and the market-place a latitude is expected, and conceded 
upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less 
than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, " You do 
not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath. 55 Hence a 
great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of falsehood, 
creeps into ordinary conversation ; and a kind of secondary or 
laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth — oath-truth, by the 
nature of the circumstances, is not required. A Quaker knows 
none of this distinction. His simple affirmation being received, 
upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps 
a value upon the words which he is to use upon the most indiffer* 



78 ELIA. 

ent topics of life. He looks to them, naturally, with more 
severity. You can have of him no more than his word. He 
knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits, 
for himself at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. He 
knows that his syllables are weighed — and how far a conscious- 
ness of this particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has 
a tendency to produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the 
question by honest means, might be illustrated, and the practice 
justified, by a more sacred example than is proper to be adduced 
upon this occasion. The admirable presence of mind, which is 
notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be traced to 
this imposed self- watchfulness — if it did not seem rather an hum- 
ble and secular scion of that old stock of religious constancy, 
which never bent or faltered, in the Primitive Friends, or gave 
way to the winds of persecution, to the violence of judge or ac- 
cuser, under trials and racking examinations. " You will never 
be the wiser, if I sit here answering your questions till midnight," 
said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had been putting 
law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. " Thereafter as the answers 
may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composure of 
this people is sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter instan- 
ces. — I was travelling in a stage-coach with three male Quakers, 
buttoned up in the straitest non-conformity of their sect. We 
stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, 
partly supper, was set before us. My friends confined themselves 
to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the landlady 
brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered that 
she had charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hos- 
tess was very clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments 
were used on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated mind 
of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The guard 
came in with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled 
out their money and formally tendered it — so much for tea — I, in 
humble imitation, tendering mine- — for the supper which I had 
taken. She would not relax in her demand. So they all three 
quietly put up their silver, as did myself, and marched out of the 
room, the eldest and gravest going first, with myself closing up 
the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow the exam- 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 79 

Jf such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. 
The steps went up. The coach drove off. The murmurs of mine 
hostess, not very indistinctly or ambiguously pronounced, became 
after a time inaudible — and now my conscience, which the whim- 
sical scene had for a while suspended, beginning to give some 
twitches, I waited, in the hope that some justification would be 
offered by these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their 
conduct. To my great surprise, not a syllable was dropped on 
the subject. They sate as mute as at a meeting. At length the 
eldest of them broke silence, in inquiring of his next neighbor, 
" Hast thou heard how indigos go at the Indian House V and the 
question operated as a soporific on my moral feeling as far as 
Exeter. 



80 ELI A. 



WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 



We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross 
for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) 
involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this 
visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd 
to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the 
invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency 
of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, 
of fitness, or proportion — of that which distinguishes the likely 
from the palpable absurd — could they have to guide them in the 
rejection or admission of any particular testimony ? — That maid- 
ens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images con- 
sumed before a fire — that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed — 
that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest 
— or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary 
about some rustic's kitchen, when no wind was stirring — were all 
equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That 
the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and 
pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fan- 
tasy of indigent eld — has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood a 
priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or stand- 
ard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's 
market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolised by a 
goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he should come some- 
times in that body, and assert his metaphor. — That the intercourse 
was opened at all between both* worlds, was perhaps the mistake 
— but that once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one 
attested story of this nature more than another on the score of ab- 
surdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by 
which a dream may be criticised. 



WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 81 

I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the 
days of received witchcraft ; that I could not have slept in a vil- 
lage where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors 
were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the universal belief that 
these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, holding 
hell tributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the Peace 
seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headborough serving a 
warrant upon them — as if they should subpoena Satan ! — Prospero 
in his boat, with his books and wand about him, suffers himself 
to be conveyed away at the mercy of his enemies to an unknown 
island. He might have raised a storm or two, we think, on the 
passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the non-resist- 
ance of witches to the constituted powers. — What stops the Fiend 
in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces — or who had made it a 
condition of his prey, that Guyon must take assay of the glorious 
bait — we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that coun- 
try. 

From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches 
and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied 
me with good store. But I shall mention the accident which di- 
rected my curiosity originally into this channel. In my father's 
book-closet, the History of the Bible by Stackhouse occupied a 
distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds — one 
of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple, deline- 
ated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist 
had been upon the spot — attracted my childish attention. There 
was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish 
that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stack- 
house is in two huge tomes — and there was a pleasure in remov- 
ing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as 
much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied 
upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work from that 
time to this, but I remember it consisted of Old Testament stories, 
orderly set down, with the objection appended to each story, and 
the solution of the objection regularly tacked to that. The objec 
Hon was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to 
the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of ancient or 
modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess 



82 ELIA. 

of candor. The solution was brief, modest and satisfactory. The 
bane and antidote were both before you. To doubts so put, and 
so quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The dragon lay 
dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But — like 
as was rather feared than realized from that slain monster in 
Spenser — from the womb of those crushed errors young dragonets 
would creep, exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint George 
as myself to vanquish. The habit of expecting objections to every 
passage, set me upon starting more objections, for the glory of 
finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered and 
perplexed, a sceptic in long-coats. The pretty Bible stories 
which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and 
sincerity of impression, and were turned into so many historic or 
chronologic theses to be defended against whatever impugners. 
I was not to disbelieve them, but — the next thing to that — I was 
to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved 
them. Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him know 
that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's weakness, 
but the child's strength. O, how ugly sound scriptural doubts 
from the mouth of a babe and a suckling ! — I should have lost 
myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with such 
unfit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece 
of ill-fortune, which about this time bt.fel me. Turning over the 
picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a 
breach in its ingenious fabric — driving my inconsiderate finger 
right through the two large quadrupeds — the elephant, and the 
camel — that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows 
next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. Stack- 
house was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted trea- 
sure. With the book, the objections and solutions gradually clear- 
ed out of my head, and have seldom returned since in any force 
to trouble me. — But there was one impression which I had im- 
bibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could shut out, and 
which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more seri- 
ously. — That detestable picture ! 

I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time, 
solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured 
in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my 



WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 83 

head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or 
eighth year of my life — so far as memory serves in things so long 
ago — without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of 
seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted 
in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Sam- 
uel — (O that old man covered with a mantle !) — I owe — not my 
midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy — but the shape and 
manner of their visitations. It was he who dressed up for me a 
hag that nightly sate upon my pillow — a sure bedfellow, when 
my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the 
book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, 
and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into 
sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day- 
light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face 
turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my witch- 
ridden pillow was. — Parents do not know what they do when they 
leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling 
about for a friendly arm — the hoping for a familiar voice — when 
ihej wake screaming — and find none to soothe them — what a ter- 
rible shaking it is to their poor nerves ! The keeping them up 
till midnight, through candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as 
they are called, — would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of 
view, prove the better caution. That detestable picture, as I 
have said, gave the fashion to my dreams — if dreams they were 
— for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. 
Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come 
self-pictured in some shape or other — 

Headless bear, black man, or ape — 

but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. — It is not book, or 
picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these ter- 
rors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. 
Dear little T. H., who of all children has been brought up with 
the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition — who 
was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to 
be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story — 
finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly 



84 ELIA. 

excluded ah extra, in his own "thick-coming fancies ;" and from 
his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at 
shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries 
of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity. 

Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimseras dire — stories of Celaeno 
and the Harpies — may reproduce themselves in the brain of 
superstition — but they were there before. They are transcripts, 
types — the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should 
the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be false, 
come to affect us at all ?- 



• Names, whose sense we see not, 



Fray us with things that be not ? 

Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, con- 
sidered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily 
injury ? — O, least of all ! These terrors are of older standing. 
They date beyond body — or, without the body, they would have 
been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in 
Dante — tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons — 
are they one-half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple 
idea of a spirit unembodied following him — 

Like one that on a lonesome road 
Doth walk in fear and dread, 
And having once turn'd round, walks on 
And turns no more his head ; 
Because he knows a frightful fiend 
Doth close behind him tread.* 

That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual — that it 
is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth — that it pre- 
dominates in the period of sinless infancy — are difficulties, the 
solution of which might afford some probable insight into our 
ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land 
of pre-existence. 

My night- fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess 
an occasional night-mare ; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a 
stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will 

* Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. 



WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 85 

come and look at me ; but I know them for mockeries, even while 
I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. 
For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say 
how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never 
romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of 
buildings — cities abroad, which I have never seen, and hardly 
have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a 
natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon — their churches, 
palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an 
inexpressible sense of delight, — a map-like distinctness of trace — 
and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. — 
I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells — my 
highest Alps, — but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my 
dreaming recognition ; and I have again and again awoke with 
ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any 
way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, 
but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mor- 
tifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will, can conjure up icy 
domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla-Khan, and Abyssinian 
maids, and songs of Abora, and caverns, 

Where Alph, the sacred river, runs, 

to solace his night solitudes — when I cannot muster a fiddle. 
Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before 
him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to Neptune — 
when my stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night 
season, raise up the ghost of a fish- wife. To set my failures in 
somewhat a mortifying light — it was after reading the noble 
Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine 
spectra ; and the poor plastic power, such as it is, within me set to 
work, to humor my folly in a sort of dream that very night. 
Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, 
riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their 
conches before me (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god), 
and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino 
Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a 
white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea- 
roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river motion, and that 



68 ELIA. 



more allegories and affectations than an opera hat. What 
authority we have in history or mythology for placing the head- 
quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this anatomical seat 
rather than in any other, is not very clear ; but we have got it, 
and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily 
imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for 
anything which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover 
addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, " Madam, 
my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal ;" or putting a 
delicate question, " Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow ?" 
But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of 
sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neigh- 
bors wait at animal and anatomical distance. 

Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural 
sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door. It " gives a very 
echo to the throne where hope is seated." But its issues seldom 
answer to this oracle within. It is so seldom that just the person 
we want to see comes. But of all the clamorous visitations the 
welcomest in expectation is the sound that ushers in, or seems to 
usher in a Valentine. As the raven himself was hoarse that an- 
nounced the fatal entrance of Duncan, so the knock of the post- 
man on this day is light, airy, confident, and befitting one that 
bringeth good tidings. It is less mechanical than on other days ; 
you will say, " That is not the post I am sure." Visions of Love, 
of Cupids, of Hymens ! — delightful eternal common-places, which 
"having been will always be ;" which no school-boy nor school- 
man can write away ; having your irreversible throne in the 
fancy and affections — what are your transports, when the happy 
maiden, opening with careful finger, careful not to break the 
emblematic seal, bursts upon the sight of some well-designed 
allegory, some type, some youthful fancy, not without verses — 

Lovers all, 
A madrigal, 

or some such device, not over abundant in sense — young Love 
disclaims it, — and hot quite silly — something between wind and 
water, a chorus where the sheep might almost join the shepherd, 
as they did, or as I apprehend they did, in Arcadia. 



VALENTINE'S DAY. 89 

All Valentines are not foolish ; and I shall not easily forget 
thine, my kind friend (if I may have leave to call you so) E. B. 
— E. B. lived opposite a young maiden whom he had often seen, 
unseen, from his parlor window in C — e street. She was all 
joyousness and innocence, and just of an age to enjoy receiving 
a Valentine, and just of a temper to bear the disappointment of 
missing one with good humor. E. B. is an artist of no common 
powers ; in the fancy parts of designing, perhaps inferior to none ; 
his name is known at the bottom of many a well-executed vignette 
in the way of his profession, but no further ; for E. B. is modest, 
and the world meets nobody half-way. E. B. meditated how he 
could repay this young maiden for many a favor which she had 
done him unknown ; for when a kindly face greets us, though 
but passing by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we should 
feel it as an obligation : and E. B. did. This good artist set 
himself at work to please the damsel. It was just before Valen- 
tine's day three years since. He wrought, unseen and unsus- 
pected, a wondrous work. We need not say it was on the finest 
gilt paper with borders — full, not of common hearts and heartless 
allegory, but all the prettiest stories of love from Ovid, and older 
poets than Ovid (for E. B. is a scholar). There was Pyramus 
and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not forgot, nor Hero and 
Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with mottoes and 
fanciful devices, such as beseemed, — a work in short of magic. 
Iris dipt the woof. This on Valentine's eve he commended to the 
ail-swallowing indiscriminate orifice — (O ignoble trust !) — of the 
common post ; but the humble medium did its duty, and from his 
watchful stand, the next morning he saw the cheerful messenger 
knock, and by and by the precious charge delivered. He saw, 
unseen, the happy girl unfold the Valentine, dance about, clap her 
hands, as one after one the pretty emblems unfolded themselves. 
She danced about, not with light love, or foolish expectations, for 
she had no lover ; or, if she had, none she knew that could have 
created those bright images which delighted her. It was more 
like some fairy present ; a God-send, as our familiarly pious an- 
cestors termed a benefit received where the benefactor was un- 
known. It would do her no harm. It would do her good for 
ever after. It is good to love the unknown. I only give this as 



90 ELIA. 

a specimen of E. B. and his modest way of doing a concealed 
kindness. 

Good morrow to my Valentine, sings poor Ophelia ; and no 
better wish, but with better auspices, we wish to all faithful 
lovers, who are not too wise to despise old legends, but are con- 
tent to rank themselves humble diocesans of old Bishop Valentine 
and his true church. 



EARLY RELATIONS. 91 



MY RELATIONS. 



— ^>»%^^*^ww 



I am arrived at that point of life at which a man may account 
it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents 
surviving. I have not that felicity — and sometimes think feel- 
ingly of a passage in Browne's Christian Morals, where he 
speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy years in the 
world. " In such a compass of time," he says, " a man may 
have a close apprehension what it is to be forgotten, when he 
hath lived to find none who could remember his father, or scarce- 
ly the friends of his youth, and may sensibly see with what a 
face in no long time Oblivion will look upon himself." 

I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom sin- 
gle blessedness had soured to the world. She often used to say, 
that I was the only thing in it which she loved ; and, when she 
thought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with a mother's tears. 
A partiality quite so exclusive my reason cannot altogether ap- 
prove. She was from morning till night poring over good books, 
and devotional exercises. Her favorite volumes were, Thomas a 
Kempis, in Stanhope's translation ; and a Roman Catholic Prayer 
Book, with the matins and complines regularly set down, — terms 
which I was at^hat time too young to understand. She persisted in 
reading them, although admonished daily concerning their Pa- 
pistical tendency ; and went to church every Sabbath as a good 
Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied ; 
though, I think at one period of her life, she told me, she had 
read with great satisfaction the Adventures of an Unfortunate 
Young Nobleman. Finding the door of the chapel in Essex 
street open one day — it was in the infancy of that heresy — she 
went in, liked the sermon, and the manner of worship, and fre- 
quented it at intervals for some time after. She came not for 



92 ELIA. 

doctrinal points, and never missed them. With some little asperi- 
ties in her constitution, which I have above hinted at, she was a 
steadfast, friendly being, and a fine old Christian. She was a 
woman of strong sense, and a shrewd mind — extraordinary at a 
repartee ; one of the few occasions of her breaking silence — else 
she did not much value wit. The only secular employment I 
remember to have seen her engaged in, was, the splitting of 
French beans, and dropping them into a china basin of fair wa- 
ter. The odor of those tender vegetables to this day comes back 
upon my sense, redolent of soothing recollections. Certainly it 
is the most delicate of culinary operations. 

Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none — to remember. 
By the uncle's side I may have been said to have been born an 
orphan. Brother, or sister, I never had any — to know them. A 
sister, I think, that should have been Elizabeth, died in both our 
infancies. What a comfort, or what a care, may I not have 
missed in her ! — But I have cousins sprinkled about in Hertford- 
shire — besides two, with whom I have been all my life in habits 
of the closest intimacy, and whom I may term cousins par 
excellence. These are James and Bridget Elia. They are 
older than myself by twelve, and ten, years ; and neither of them 
seems disposed, in matters of advice and guidance, to waive any 
of the prerogatives which primogeniture confers. May they con- 
tinue still in the same mind ; and when they shall be seventy-five, 
and seventy-three, years old (I cannot spare them sooner), persist 
in treating me in my grand climacteric precisely as a stripling, or 
younger brother ! 

James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, 
which not every critic can penetrate ; or, if we feel, we cannot 
explain them. The pen of Yorick, and of none since his, could 
have drawn J. E. entire — those fine Shandean lights and shades, 
which make up his story. I must limp after in my poor antithe- 
tical manner, as the fates have given me grace and talent. J. E., 
then, to the eye of a common observer at least — seemeth made up 
of contradictory principles. The genuine child of impulse, 
the frigid philosopher of prudence — the phlegm of my cousin's 
doctrine is invariably at war with his temperament, which is high 
sanguine. With always some fire-new project in his brain, J. E. 



MY RELATIONS. 93 

is the systematic opponent of innovation, and crier down of every- 
thing that has not stood the test of age and experiment. With a 
hundred fine notions chasing one another hourly in his fancy, he 
is startled at the least approach to the romantic in others : and, 
determined by his own sense in everything, commends you to the 
guidance of common sense on all occasions. — With a touch of the 
eccentric in all which he does, or says, he is only anxious that 
you should not commit yourself by doing anything absurd or sin- 
gular. On my once letting slip at table, that I was not fond of a 
certain popular dish, he begged me at any rate not to say so — for 
the world w r ould think me mad. He disguises a passionate fond- 
ness for works of high art (whereof he hath amassed a choice col- 
lection), under the pretext of buying only to sell again — that his 
enthusiasm may give no encouragement to yours. Yet, if it were 
so, why does that piece of tender, pastoral Domenichino hang still 
by his wall ? — is the ball of his sight much more dear to him ?— 
or what picture-dealer can talk like him ? 

Whereas mankind in general are observed to warp their spe- 
culative conclusions to the bent of their individual humors, his 
theories are sure to be in diametrical opposition to his constitu- 
tion. He is courageous as Charles of Sweden, upon instinct ; 
chary of his person upon principle, as a travelling Quaker. He 
nas been preaching up to me, all my life, the doctrine of bowing 
to the great — the necessity of forms, and manner, to a man's get- 
ting on in the world. He himself never aims at either, that I can 
discover, — and has a spirit that would stand upright in the pre- 
sence of the Cham of Tartary. It is pleasant to hear him dis- 
course of patience — extolling it as the truest wisdom — and to see 
him during the last seven minutes that his dinner is getting ready. 
Nature never ran up in her haste a more restless piece of work- 
manship than when she moulded this impetuous cousin — and Art 
never turned out a more elaborate orator than he can display him- 
self to be, upon this favorite topic of the advantages of quiet and 
contentedness in the state, whatever it be, that w T e are placed in. 
He is triumphant on this theme, when he has you safe in one of 
those short stages that ply for the western road, in a very obstruct- 
ing manner, at the foot of John Murray's street, where you get 
in when it is empty, and are expected to wait till the vehicle hath 



94 ELIA. 

completed her just freight — a trying three-quarters of an hour to 
some people. He wonders at your fidgetiness — " where could we 
be better than we are, thus sitting, thus consulting ?" — " prefers, for 
his part, a state of rest to locomotion," — with an eye all the while 
upon the coachman, — till at length, waxing out of all patience, at 
your want of it, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstrance at the 
fellow for detaining us so long over the time which he had pro- 
fessed, and declares peremptorily, that " the gentleman in the 
coach is determined to get out, if he does not drive on that 
instant." 

Very quick at inventing an argument, or detecting a sophistry, 
he is incapable of attending you in any chain of arguing. In- 
deed he makes wild work with logic, and seems to jump at most 
admirable conclusions by some process not at all akin to it. Con- 
sonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to deny, upon certain 
occasions, that there exists such a faculty at all in man as reason ; 
and wondereth how man came first to have a conceit of it — en- 
forcing his negation with all the might of reasoning he is master 
of. He has some speculative notions against laughter, and will 
maintain that laughing is not natural to him — when peradventure 
the next moment his lungs shall crow like Chanticleer. He says 
some of the best things in the world, and declareth that wit is his 
aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing the Eton boys at play 
in their grounds — What a pity to think, that these fine ingenuous 
lads in a few years will all he changed into frivolous Members of 
Parliament ! 

His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous — and in age he dis- 
covered no symptom of cooling. This is that which I admire in 
him. I hate people who meet Time half-way. I am for no com- 
promise with that inevitable spoiler. While he lives, J. E. will 
take his swing. It does me good, as I w T alk towards the street of 
my daily avocation, on some fine May morning, to meet him 
marching in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly handsome 
presence, and shining sanguine face, that indicates some purchase 
in his eye — a Claude or a Hobbima — for much of his enviable 
leisure is consumed at Christie's and Phillips's — or where not, to 
pick up pictures, and such gauds. On these occasions he mostly 
stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage a person 



MY RELATIONS. 95 

like me possesses above himself, in having his time occupied with 
business which he must do ; assureth me that he often feels it hang 
heavy on his hands ; wishes he had fewer holidays, and goes off- 
Westward Ho ! — chanting a tune to Pall Mall, perfectly convinced 
that he has convinced me— while I proceed in my opposite direc- 
tion tuneless. 

It is pleasant again to see this Professor of Indifference doing 
the honors of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it. 
You must view it in every light, till lie has found the best — 
placing it at this distance, and at that, but always suiting the 
focus of your sight to his own. You must spy at it through 
your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective, though you assure 
him that to you the landscape shows much more agreeable 
without that artifice. Wo be to the luckless wight, who does 
not only not respond to his rapture, but who should drop an unsea- 
sonable intimation of preferring one of his anterior bargains to 
the present ! The last is always his best hit — his " Cynthia of 
the minute." Alas ! how many a mild Madonna have I known 
to come in — a Raphael ! — keep its ascendency for a few brief 
moons — then, after certain intermedial degradations, from the 
front drawing-room to the back gallery, thence to the dark parlor, 
adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive lower- 
ing ascriptions of filiation, mildly breaking its fall — consigned to 
the oblivious lumber-room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or 
plain Carlo Maratti ! — which things when I beheld, musing upon 
the chances and mutabilities of fate below, hath made me to 
reflect upon the altered condition of great personages, or that 
woful Queen of Richard the Second — - 

• set forth in pomp, 



She came adorned hither like sweet May 
Sent back like Hollo wmass or shortest day. 

With great love for you, J. E. hath but a limited sympatny 
with what you feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, and 
makes slender guesses at what passes in your mind. He never 
pierces the marrow of your ha*bits. He will tell an old estab- 
lished playgoer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so (naming one 
of the theatres), is a very lively comedian —as a piece of news ! 



94 ELIA. 

completed her just freight — a trying three-quarters of an hour to 
some people. He wonders at your fidgetiness — " where could we 
be better than we are, thus sitting, thus consulting ?" — " prefers, for 
his part, a state of rest to locomotion," — with an eye all the while 
upon the coachman, — till at length, waxing out of all patience, at 
your want of it, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstrance at the 
fellow for detaining us so long over the time which he had pro- 
fessed, and declares peremptorily, that " the gentleman in the 
coach is determined to get out, if he does not drive on that 
instant." 

Very quick at inventing an argument, or detecting a sophistry, 
he is incapable of attending you in any chain of arguing. In- 
deed he makes wild work with logic, and seems to jump at most 
admirable conclusions by some process not at all akin to it. Con- 
sonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to deny, upon certain 
occasions, that there exists such a faculty at all in man as reason ; 
and wondereth how man came first to have a conceit of it — en- 
forcing his negation with all the might of reasoning he is master 
of. He has some speculative notions against laughter, and will 
maintain that laughing is not natural to him — when peradventure 
the next moment his lungs shall crow like Chanticleer. He says 
some of the best things in the world, and declareth that wit is his 
aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing the Eton boys at play 
in their grounds — What a pity to think, that these fine ingenuous 
lads in a few years will all he changed into frivolous Members of 
Parliament ! 

His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous — and in age he dis- 
covered no symptom of cooling. This is that which I admire in 
him. I hate people who meet Time half-way. I am for no com- 
promise with that inevitable spoiler. While he lives, J. E. will 
take his swing. It does me good, as I walk towards the street of 
my daily avocation, on some fine May morning, to meet him 
marching in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly handsome 
presence, and shining sanguine face, that indicates some purchase 
in his eye — a Claude or a Hobbima — for much of his enviable 
leisure is consumed at Christie's and Phillips's — or where not, to 
pick up pictures, and such gauds. On these occasions he mostly 
stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage a person 



MY RELATIONS. 9J> 

like me possesses above himself, in having his time occupied with 
business which he must do ; assureth me that he often feels it hang 
heavy on his hands ; wishes he had fewer holidays, and goes ofT— • 
Westward Ho ! — chanting a tune to Pall Mall, perfectly convinced 
that he has convinced me— while I proceed in my opposite direc- 
tion tuneless. 

It is pleasant again to see this Professor of Indifference doing 
the honors of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it. 
You must view it in every light, till he has found the best — 
placing it at this distance, and at that, but always suiting the 
focus of your sight, to his own. You must spy at it through 
your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective, though you assure 
him that to you the landscape shows much more agreeable 
without that artifice. Wo be to the luckless wight, who does 
not only not respond to his rapture, but who should drop an unsea- 
sonable intimation of preferring one of his anterior bargains to 
the present ! The last is always his best hit — his " Cynthia of 
the minute. 55 Alas ! how many a mild Madonna have I known 
to come in — a Raphael !— keep its ascendency for a few brief 
moons — then, after certain intermedial degradations, from the 
front drawing-room to the back gallery, thence to the dark parlor, 
adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive lower- 
ing ascriptions of filiation, mildly breaking its fall — consigned to 
the oblivious lumber-room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or 
plain Carlo Maratti ! — which things when I beheld, musing upon 
the chances and mutabilities of fate below, hath made me to 
reflect upon the altered condition of great personages, or that 
woful Queen of Richard the Second — > 

set forth in pomp, 



She came adorned hither like sweet May 
Sent back like Hollowmass or shortest day. 

With great love for you, J. E. hath but a limited sympatny 
with what you feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, and 
makes slender guesses at what passes in your mind. He never 
pierces the marrow of your ha*bits. He will tell an old estab- 
lished playgoer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so (naming one 
of the theatres), is a very lively comedian —as a piece of news ! 



96 ELIA. 

He advertised me but the other day of some pleasant green lanes 
which he had found out for me, knowing me to ie a great walker in 
my own immediate vicinity, who have haunted the identical spot 
any time these twenty years ! He has not much respect for that 
class of feelings which goes by the name of sentimentaL He 
applies the definition of real evil to bodily sufferings exclusively, 
and rejecteth all others as imaginary. He is affected by the 
sight, or the bare supposition, of a creature in pain, to a degree 
which I have never witnessed out of womankind. A constitu- 
tional acuteness to this class of sufferings may in part account for 
this. The animal tribe in particular he taketh under his especial 
protection. A broken- winded or spur-galled horse is sure to find 
an advocate in him. An over-loaded ass is his client for ever. 
He is the apostle to the brute kind — the never-failing friend of 
those who have none to care for them. The contemplation of 
a lobster boiled, or eels skinned alive, will wring him so, that " all 
for pity he could die." It will take the savor from his palate, and 
the rest from his pillow, for days and nights. With the intense 
feeling of Thomas Clarkson, he wanted only the steadiness of 
pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that " true yoke-fellow with 
Time," to have effected as much for the Animal, as he hath done 
for the Negro Creation. But my uncontrollable cousin is but imper- 
fectly formed for purposes which demand co-operation. He can- 
not wait. His amelioration-plans must be ripened in a day. For 
this reason he has cut but an equivocal figure in benevolent soci- 
eties, and combinations for the alleviation of human sufferings. 
His zeal constantly makes him to outrun, and put out, his coad- 
jutors. He thinks of relieving, while they think of debating. 
He was black-balled out of a society for the Relief of * * * * * 
******, because the fervor of his humanity toiled beyond 
the formal apprehension, and creeping processes, of his associates. 
I shall always consider this distinction as a patent of nobility in 
the Elia family ! 

Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to smile at, or up- 
braid, my unique cousin ? Marry, heaven, and all good manners, 
and the understanding that should be between kinsfolk, forbid ! 
With all the strangenesses of this strangest of the Elias — I would 
not have him in one jot or tittle other than he is ; neither would 



MY RELATIONS. 97 

I barter or exchange my wild kinsman for the most exact, regu- 
lar, and everyway consistent kinsman breathing. 

In my next, reader, I may perhaps give you some account of 
my cousin Bridget — if you are not already surfeited with cousins 
— and take you by the hand, if you are willing to go with us, on 
an excursion which we made a summer or two since, in search 
of more cousins — 

Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. 

8 



ELIA. 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. 



Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. 
I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of 
memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort 
of double singleness ; with such tolerable comfort, upon the 
whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go 
out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail 
my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits — 
yet so, as " with a difference." We are generally in harmon^, 
with occasional bickerings — as it should be among near relations. 
Our sympathies are rather understood, than expressed ; and 
once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than 
ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was 
altered. We are both great readers in different directions. While 
I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old 
Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in 
some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading- 
table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative 
teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She 
must have a story — well, ill, or indifferently told — so there be 
life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluc- 
tuations of fortune in fiction — and almost in real life — have 
ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way 
humors and opinions — heads with some diverting twist in them — 
the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousins has a 
native disrelish of anything that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing 
goes down with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road 
of common sympathy. She " holds Nature more clever." I can 
pardon her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. 99 

Medici ; but she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful in- 
sinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touch- 
ing the intellectuals of a dear favorite of mine, of the last century 
but one — the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, — but again some- 
what fantastical, and original-brained, generous Margaret New- 
castle. 

It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could 
have wished, to have had for her associates and mine, free-think- 
ers — leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies and systems ; 
but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts, their opinions. That 
which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retains its 
authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks 
with her understanding. 

We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive ; and I 
have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly 
this — that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns 
out, that I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But 
where we have differed upon moral points ; upon something pro- 
per to be done, or let alone ; whatever heat of opposition, or 
steadiness of conviction, I set out with, I am sure always, in the 
long-run, to be brought over to her way of thinking. 

I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle 
hand, for Bridget does not like to be told of her faults. She hath 
an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in company : 
at which times she will answer yes or no to a question, without fully 
understanding its purport — which is provoking, and derogatory in 
the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. 
Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, 
but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the 
purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to 
it greatly ; but in matters which are not stuff of the conscience, 
she hath been known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably. 

Her education in youth was not much attended to ; and she 
happily missed all that train of female garniture, which passeth 
by the name of accomplishments. She was tumbled early, by 
accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English 
reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at 
will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty 



100 ELIA. 

girls, they should be brought up exactly in this fashion. I know 
not whether their chance in wedlock might not be diminished by 
it ; but I can answer for it, that it makes (if the worst come to 
the worst) most incomparable old maids. 

In a season of distress, she is the truest comforter ; but in the 
teasing accidents, and minor perplexities, which do not call out 
the will to meet them, she sometimes maketh matters worse by an 
excess of participation. If she does not always divide your 
trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions of life she is sure always 
to treble your satisfaction. She is excellent to be at play with, or 
upon a visit ; but best, when she goes a journey with you. 

We made an excursion together a few summers since, into 
Hertfordshire, to beat up the quarters of some of our less-known 
relations in that fine corn county. 

The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End ; or Mackerel 
End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of 
Hertfordshire ; a farm-house,— delightfully situated within a gentle 
walk from Wheathampstead. I can just remember having been 
there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, under the 
care of Bridget ; who, as I have said, is older than myself by 
some ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the re- 
mainder of our joint existences ; that we might share them in 
equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at that 
time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married 
my grandmother's sister. His name was Gladman. My grand- 
mother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and 
the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the county, but 
the Fields are almost extinct. More than forty years had elapsed 
since the visit I speak of; and, for the greater portion of that 
period, we had lost sight of the other two branches also. Who 
or what sort of persons inherited Mackery End — kindred or 
strange folk — we were afraid almost to conjecture, but deter- 
mined some day to explore. 

By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton 
in our way from Saint Albans, we arrived at the spot of our 
anxious curiosity about noon. The sight of the old farm-house, 
though every trace of it was effaced from my recollection, affected 
me with a pleasure which I had not experienced for many a year. 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. 101 

For though I had forgotten it, we had never forgotten being there 
together, and we had been talking about Mackery End all our 
lives, till memory on my part became mocked with a phantom of 
itself, and I thought I knew the aspect of a place, which, when 
present, O how unlike it was to that, which I had conjured up so 
many times instead of it ! 

Still the air breathed balmily about it ; the season was in the 
" heart of June," and I could say with the poet, 

But thou, that didst appear so fair 

To fond imagination, 
Dost rival in the light of day 

Her delicate creation ! 

Bridget's was more a waking bliss than mine, for she easily 
remembered her old acquaintance again — some altered features, 
of course, a little grudged at. At first, indeed, she was ready 
to disbelieve for joy ; but the scene soon re-confirmed itself in 
her affections — and she traversed every outpost of the old man- 
sion, to the wood-house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon- 
house had stood (house and birds were alike flown) — with a 
breathless impatience of recognition, which was more pardonable 
perhaps than decorous at the age of fifty odd. But Bridget in 
some things is behind her years. 

The only thing left was to get into the house- — and that was a 
difficulty which to me singly would have been insurmountable ; 
for I am terribly shy in making myself known to strangers and 
out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, stronger than scruple, winged my 
cousin in without me ; but she soon returned with a creature that 
might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome. It was the 
youngest of the Gladmans ; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had 
become mistress of the old mansion. A comely brood are the 
Brutons. Six of them, females, were noted as the handsomest 
young women in the county. But this adopted Bruton, in my 
mind, was better than they all — more comely. She was born too 
late to have remembered me. She just recollected in early life 
to have had her cousin Bridget once pointed out to her, climbing 
a stile. But the name of kindred, and of cousinship, was enough. 
Those slender ties, that prove slight as gossamer in the rending 



102 ELIA. 

atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as we found it, in hearty, 
homely, loving Hertfordshire. — In five minutes we were as 
thoroughly acquainted as if we had been born and bred up toge- 
ther ; were familiar, even to the calling each other by our Chris- 
tian names. So Christians should call one another. To have 
seen Bridget, and her — it was like the meeting of the two scrip- 
tural cousins ! There was a grace and dignity, an amplitude of 
form and stature, answering to her mind, in this farmer's wife, 
which would have shined in a palace — or so we thought it. We 
were made welcome by husband and wife equally — we, and our 
friend that was with us. — I had almost forgotten him — but B. F. 
will not so soon forget that meeting, if peradventure he shall read 
this on the far distant shores where the kangaroo haunts. The 
fatted calf was made ready, or rather was already so, as if in an- 
ticipation of our coming : and, after an appropriate glass of native 
wine, never let me forget with what honest pride this hospitable 
cousin made us proceed to Wheathampstead, to introduce us (as 
some new-found rarity) to her mother and sister Gladmans, who 
did indeed know something more of us, at a time when she almost 
knew nothing. — With what corresponding kindness we were re- 
ceived by them also — how Bridget's memory, exalted by the 
occasion, warmed into a thousand half-obliterated recollections of 
things and persons, to my utter astonishment, and her own — and 
to the astoundment of B. F. who sat by, almost the only thing 
that was not a cousin there, — old effaced images of more than 
half-forgotten names and circumstances still crowding back upon 
her, as words written in lemon come out upon exposure to a 
friendly warmth, — when I forget all this, then may my country 
cousins forget me ; and Bridget no more remember, that in the 
days of weakling infancy I was her tender charge — as I have 
been her care in foolish manhood since — in those pretty pastoral 
walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in Hertfordshire, 



MY FIEST PLAY. 103 



MY FIEST PLAY. 



At the north end of Cross-court there yet stands a portal, of some 
architectural pretensions, though reduced to humble use, serving 
at present for an entrance to a printing-office. This old door- way, 
if you are young, reader, you may not know was the identical pit 
entrance to old Drury — Garrick's Drury — all of it that is left. I 
never pass it without shaking some forty years from off my shoul- 
ders, recurring to the evening when I passed through it to see my 
first play. The afternoon had been wet, and the condition of our 
going (the elder folks and myself) was, that the rain should cease. 
With what a beating heart did I watch from the window the pud- 
dles, from the stillness of which I was taught to prognosticate the 
desired cessation ! I seem to remember the last spurt, and the glee 
with which I ran to announce it. 

We went with orders, which my godfather F. had sent us. He 
kept the oil shop (now Davies's) at the corner of Featherstone- 
baildings, in Holborn. F. was a tall grave person, lofty in speech, 
and had pretensions above his rank. He associated in those days 
with John Palmer, the comedian, whose gait and bearing he 
seemed to copy ; if John (which is quite as likely) did not rather 
borrow somewhat of his manner from my godfather. He was 
also known to, and visited by, Sheridan. It was to hisf house in 
Holborn that young Brinsley brought his first wife on her elope- 
ment with him from a boarding-school at Bath — -the beautiful 
Maria Linley. My parents were present (over a quadrille table) 
when he arrived in the evening with his harmonious charge. 
From either of these connexions it may be inferred that my god- 
father could command an order for the then Drury-lane theatre at 
pleasure- — and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue of those cheap billets, 



104 ELIA. 

in Brinsley's easy autograph, I have heard him say was the sole 
remuneration which he had received for many years 5 nightly illu- 
mination of the orchestra and various avenues of that theatre — 
and he was content it should be so. The honor of Sheridan's 
familiarity — or supposed familiarity — was better to my godfather 
than money. 

F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen ; grandiloquent, yet 
courteous. His delivery of the commonest matters of fact was 
Ciceronian. He had two Latin words almost constantly in his 
mouth (how odd sounds Latin from an oilman's lips !) which my 
better knowledge since has enabled me to correct. In strict pro- 
nunciation they should have been sounded vice versa — but in those 
young years they impressed me with more awe than they would 
now do, read aright from Seneca or Varro — in his own peculiar 
pronunciation, monosyllabically elaborated, or Anglicized, into 
something like verse verse. By an imposing manner, and the help 
of these distorted syllables, he climbed (but that was little) to the 
highest parochial honors which St. Andrew's has to bestow. 

He is dead — and thus much I thought due to his memory, both 
for my first orders (little wondrous talismans ! — slight keys, and 
insignificant to outward sight, but opening to me more than Ara- 
bian paradises !) and moreover that by his testamentary benefi- 
cence I came into possession of the only landed property which I 
could ever call my own — -situate near the road- way village of 
pleasant Puckeridge, in Hertfordshire. When I journeyed down 
to take possession, and planted my foot on my own ground, the 
stately habits of the donor descended upon me, and I strode (shall 
I confess the vanity ?) with larger paces over my allotment of 
three-quarters of an acre, with its commodious mansion in the 
midst, with the feeling of an English freeholder that all betwixt 
sky and centre was my own. The estate has passed into more 
prudent hands, and nothing but an agrarian can restore it. 

In those days were pit orders. Beshrew the uncomfortable 
manager who abolished them ! — with one of these we went. I 
remember the waiting at the door — not that which is left — but 
between that and an inner door in shelter — O when shall I be such 
an expectant again ! — with the cry of nonpareils, an indispensable 
play-house accompaniment in those days. As near as I can 



MY FIRST PLAY. 105 

recollect, the fashionable pronunciation of the theatrical fruiter- 
esses then was, " Chase some oranges, chase some numparels, 
chase a bill of the play;" — chase pro choose. But when we got 
in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a heaven to my 
imagination, which was soon to be disclosed — the breathless anti- 
cipations I endured ! I had seen something like it in the plate 
prefixed to Troilus and Cressida, in Rowe's Shakspeare — the tent 
scene with Diomede — and a sight of that plate can always bring 
back in a measure the feeling of that evening. — The boxes at 
that time, full of well-dressed women of quality, projected over 
the pit : and the pilasters reaching down were adorned with a 
glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), 
resembling — a homely fancy — but I judged it to be sugar-candy — 
yet, to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it 
appeared a glorified candy ! — The orchestra lights at length arose, 
those " fair Auroras !" Once the bell sounded. It was to ring 
out yet once again — and incapable of the anticipation, I reposed 
my shut eyes in a sort of resignation upon the maternal lap. It 
rang the second time. The curtain drew up — I was not past six 
years old and the play was Artaxerxes ! 

I had dabbled a little in the Universal History — the ancient 
part of it — and here was the court of Persia. — It was being ad- 
mitted to a sight of the past. I took no proper interest in the 
action going on, for I understood not its import — but I heard the 
word Darius, and I was in the midst of Daniel. All feeling was 
absorbed in vision. Gorgeous vests, gardens, palaces, princesses, 
passed before me. I knew not players. I was in Persepolis for 
the time, and the burning idol of their devotion almost converted 
me into a worshipper. I was awe-struck, and believed those sig- 
nifications to be something more than elemental fires. It was all 
enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure has since visited 
me but in dreams. — Harlequin's invasion followed ; where, I re- 
member, the transformation of the magistrates into reverend bel- 
dams seemed to me a piece of grave historic justice, and the tailor 
carrying his own head to be as sober a verity as the legend of St. 
Denys. 

The next play to which I was taken was the Lady of the 
Manor, of which, with the exception of some scenery, very faint 



106 ELIA. 

traces are left in my memory. It was followed by a pantomime, 
called Lun's Ghost — a satiric touch, I apprehend, upon Rich, not 
long since dead — but to my apprehension (too sincere for satire), 
Lun was as remote a piece of antiquity as Lud — the father of a 
line of Harlequins — transmitting his dagger of lath (the wooden 
sceptre) through countless ages. I saw the primeval Motley come 
from his silent tomb in a ghastly vest of white patch- work, like 
the apparition of a dead rainbow. So Harlequins (thought I) look 
when they are dead. 

My third play followed in quick succession. It was the Way 
of the World. I think I must have sat at it as grave as a judge ; 
for, I remember, the hysteric affectations of good Lady Wishfort 
affected me like some solemn tragic passion. Robinson Crusoe 
followed ; in which Crusoe, man Friday, and the parrot, were as 
good and authentic as in the story. — The clownery and pantaloon- 
ery of these pantomimes have clean passed out of my head. I 
believe, I no more laughed at them, than at the same age I should 
have been disposed to laugh at the grotesque Gothic heads 
(seeming to me then replete with devout meaning), that gape, and 
grin, in stone around the inside of the old Round Church (my 
church) of the Templars. 

I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was from six 
to seven years old. After the intervention of six or seven other 
years (for at school all play-going was inhibited) I again entered 
the doors of a theatre. That old Artaxerxes evening had never 
done ringing in my fancy. I expected the same feelings to come 
again with the same occasion. But we differ from ourselves less 
at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six. In that inter- 
val what had I not lost ! At the first period I knew nothing, 
understood nothing, discriminated nothing. I felt all, loved all, 
wondered all — 

Was nourished, I could not tell how — 

I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. 
The same things were there materially ; but the emblem, the 
reference, was gone ! — The green curtain was no longer a veil, 
drawn between two worlds, the unfolding of which was to 
bring back past ages to present a " royal ghost," — but a certain 



MY FIRST PLAY 107 

quantity of green baize, which was to separate the audience for a 
given time from certain of their fellowmen who were to come 
forward and pretend those parts. The lights — the orchestra lights 
— came up a clumsy machinery. The first ring, and the second 
ring, was now but a trick of the prompter's bell — which had been, 
like the note of a cuckoo, a phantom of a voice, no hand seen or 
guessed at which ministered to its warning. The actors were men 
and women painted. I thought the fault was in them ; but it was 
in myself, and the alteration which those many centuries, — of six 
short twelve-months — had wrought in me. — Perhaps it was 
fortunate for me that the play of the evening was but an indifferent 
comedy, as it gave me time to crop some unreasonable expecta- 
tions, which might have interfered with the genuine emotions with 
which I was soon after enabled to enter upon the first appearance 
to me of Mrs. Siddons in Isabella. Comparison and retrospection 
soon yielded to the present attraction of the scene ; and the theatre 
became to me, upon a new stock, the most delightful of recrea- 
tions. 



108 ELIA. 



MODERN GALLANTRY. 



In comparing modern with ancient manners, we are pleased to 
compliment ourselves upon the point of gallantry; a certain 
obsequiousness, or deferential respect, which we are supposed to 
pay to females, as females. 

I shall believe that this principle actuates our conduct, when I 
can forget, that in the nineteenth century of the era from which 
we date our civility, we are but just beginning to leave off the 
very frequent practice of whipping females in public, in common 
with the coarsest male offenders. 

I shall believe it to be influential, when I can shut my eyes to 
the fact, that in England women are still occasionally — hanged. 

I shall believe in it, when actresses are no longer subject to be 
hissed off a stage by gentlemen. 

I shall believe in it, when Dorimant hands a fish- wife across 
the kennel ; or assists the apple-woman to pick up her wandering 
fruit, which some unlucky dray has just dissipated. 

I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants in humbler life, who 
would be thought in their way notable adepts in this refinement, 
shall act upon it in places where they are not known, or think 
themselves not observed — when I shall see the traveller for some 
rich tradesman part with his admired box-coat, to spread it over the 
defenceless shoulders of the poor woman, who is passing to her 
parish on the roof of the same stage-coach with him, drenched in 
the rain — when I shall no longer see a woman standing up in the 
pit of a London theatre, till she is sick and faint with the exertion, 
with men about her, seated at their ease, and jeering at her dis- 
tress ; till one, that seems to have more manners or conscience 
than the rest, significantly declares " she should be welcome to 



MODERN GALLANTRY. 109 

his seat, if she were a little younger and handsomer. " Place this 
dapper warehouseman, or that rider, in a circle of their own 
female acquaintance, and you shall confess you have not seen a 
politer-bred man in Lothbury. 

Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there is some such principle 
influencing our conduct, when more than one-half of the drudgery 
and coarse servitude of the world shall cease to be performed by 
women. 

Until that day comes, I shall never believe this boasted point to 
be anything more than a conventional fiction ; a pageant got up 
betwixt the sexes, in a certain rank, and at a certain time of life, 
in which both find their account equally. 

I shall be even disposed to rank it among the salutary fictions 
of life, when in polite circles I shall see the same attentions paid 
to age as to youth, to homely features as to handsome, to coarse 
complexions as to clear — to the woman, as she is a woman, not as 
she is a beauty, a fortune, or a title. 

I shall believe it to be something more than a name, when a 
well-dressed gentleman in a well-dressed company can advert to 
the topic of female old age without exciting, and intending to excite, 
a sneer : — when the phrases " antiquated virginity/ 5 and such a 
one has " overstood her market/ 5 pronounced in good company, 
shall raise immediate offence in man, or woman, that shall hear 
them spoken. 

Joseph Paice, of Bread-street-hill, merchant, and one of the Di- 
rectors of the South-Sea company — the same to whom Edwards, 
the Shakspeare commentator, has addressed a fine sonnet — was 
the only pattern of consistent gallantry I have met with. He 
took me under his shelter at an early age, and bestowed some 
pains upon me. I owe to his precepts and example whatever 
there is of the man of business (and that is not much) in my com- 
position. It was not his fault that 1 did not profit more. Though 
bred a Presbyterian, and brought up a merchant, he was the 
finest gentleman of his time. He had not one system of attention 
to females in the drawing-room, and another in the shop, or at the 
stall. I do not mean that he made no distinction. But he never 
lost sight of sex, or overlooked it in the casualties of a disadvan- 
tageous situation. I have seen him stand bareheaded — smile if 



110 EL1A. 

you please — to a poor servant girl, while she has been inquiring 
of him the way to some street — in such a posture of unforced 
civility, as neither to embarrass her in the acceptance, nor him- 
self in the offer, of it. He was no dangler, in the common accep- 
tation of the word, after women ; but he reverenced and upheld, 
in every form in which it came before him, womanhood, I have 
seen him — nay, smile not — tenderly escorting a market-woman, 
whom he had encountered in a shower, exalting his umbrella 
over her poor basket of fruit, that it might receive no damage, 
with as much carefulness as if she had been a Countess. To the 
reverend form of Female Eld he would yield the wall (though it 
were to an ancient beggar-woman) with more ceremony than we 
can afford to show our grandams. He was the Preux Chevalier 
of Age ; the Sir Calidore, or Sir Tristan, to those who have no 
Calidores or Tristans to defend them. The roses, that had long 
faded thence, still bloomed for him in those withered and yellow 
cheeks. 

He was never married, but in his youth he paid his addresses 
to the beautiful Susan Winstanley — old Winstanley's daughter 
of Clapton — who dying in the early days of their courtship, con- 
firmed in him the resolution of perpetual bachelorship. It was 
during their short courtship, he told me, that he had been one day 
treating his mistress with a profusion of civil speeches — the com- 
mon gallantries — to which kind of thing she had hitherto mani- 
fested no repugnance — but in this instance with no effect. He 
could not obtain from her a decent acknowledgment in return. 
She rather seemed to resent his compliments. He could not set 
it down to caprice, for the lady had always shown herself above 
that littleness. When he ventured on the following day, finding 
her a little better humored, to expostulate with her on her cold- 
ness of yesterday, she confessed, with her usual frankness, that 
she had no sort of dislike to his attentions ; that she could even 
endure some high-flown compliments ; that a young woman placed 
in her situation had a right to expect all sort of civil things said 
to her ; that she hoped she could digest a dose of adulation, short 
of insincerity, with as little injury to her humility as most young 
women : but that — a little before he had commenced his compli- 
ments — she had overheard him by accident, in rather rough Ian- 



MODERN GALLANTRY. Ill 

guage, rating a young woman, who had not brought home his 
cravats quite at the appointed time, and she thought to herself, 
" As I am Miss Susan Winstanley, and a young lady — a reputed 
beauty, and known to be a fortune, — I can have my choice of the 
finest speeches from the mouth of this very fine gentleman who is 
courting me — but if I had been poor Mary Such-a-one {naming tlie 
milliner), — and had failed of bringing home the cravats to the ap- 
pointed hour — though perhaps I had sat up half the night to for- 
ward them — what sort of compliments should I have received 
then ? — And my woman's pride came to my assistance ; and I 
thought, that if it were only to do me honor, a female, like myself, 
might have received handsomer usage : and I was determined not 
to accept any fine speeches, to the compromise of that sex, the 
belonging to which was after all my strongest claim and title to 
them." 

I think the lady discovered both generosity, and a just way of 
thinking, in this rebuke which she gave her lover • and I have 
sometimes imagined, that the uncommon strain of courtesy, which 
through life regulated the actions and behavior of my friend to- 
wards all of womankind indiscriminately, owed its happy origin 
to this seasonable lesson from the lips of his lamented mistress. 

I wish the whole female world would entertain the same notion 
of these things that Miss Winstanley showed. Then we should 
see something of the spirit of consistent gallantry ; and no longer 
witness the anomaly of the same man — a pattern of true polite- 
ness to a wife — of cold contempt, or rudeness, to a sister — the 
idolator of his female mistress — the disparager and despiser of his 
no less female aunt, or unfortunate — still female — maiden cousin. 
Just so much respect as a woman derogates from her own sex, in 
whatever condition placed — her handmaid, or dependent — she de- 
serves to have diminished from herself on that score ; and proba- 
bly will feel the diminution, when youth, and beauty, and advan- 
tages, not inseparable from sex, shall lose of their attraction. 
What a woman should demand of a man in courtship, or after it, 
is first — respect for her as she is a woman ; — and next to that — 
to be respected by him above all other women. But let her stand 
upon her female character as upon a foundation ; and let the at- 



112 ELIA. 

tentions, incident to individual preference, be so many pretty ad- 
ditaments and ornaments — as many, and as fanciful, as you please 
—to that main structure. Let her first lesson be with sweet Susan 
Winstanley — to reverence her sew. 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 113 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 



I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the 
Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, 
I had almost said — for in those young years, what was this king 
of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places ? — 
these are of my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no 
verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than 
those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot. 

There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, 
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride, 
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, 
There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide, 
Till they decayed through pride. 

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a 
transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time — 
the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet-street, by unexpected 
avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green re- 
cesses ! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that part of it, which, 
from three sides, overlooks the greater garden ; that goodly pile 

Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight, 

confronting with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantas- 
tically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown- 
office Row (place of my kindly engendure), right opposite the 
stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely 
trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her 
Twickenham Naiades ! a man would give something to have 
been born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine 
9 



114 ELI A. 

Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have made 
to rise and fall, how* many times ! to the astoundment of the young 
urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its 
recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous 
work as magic ! What an antique air had the now almost effaced 
sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that 
Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its 
flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the 
fountain of light ! How would the dark line steal imperceptibly 
on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, 
never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests 
of sleep ! 

Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand 

Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! 

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments 
of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, 
compared with the simple altar-like structure, and silent heart- 
language of the old dial ! It stood as the garden god of Christian 
gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished ? If its busi- 
ness-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral 
uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke 
of moderate labors, of pleasures not protracted after sun-set, of 
temperance, and good hours. It was the primitive clock, the 
horologue of the first world. Adam could scarce have missed it in 
Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet plants and 
flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warb- 
lings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd 
" carved it out quaintly in the sun ;" and, turning philosopher by 
the very occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than 
tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by 
Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out 
of herbs and flowers. I must quote his verses a little higher up, 
for they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a witty delicacy. 
They will not come in awkwardly, I hope, in a talk of fountains 
and sun-dials. He is speaking of sweet garden scenes : — 

What wondrous life is this I lead ! 
Ripe apples drop about my head. 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 115 

The luscious clusters of the vine 

Upon my mouth do crush their wine. 

The nectarine, and curious peach, 

Into my hands themselves do reach. 

Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 

Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. 

Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less 

Withdraws into its happiness. 

The mind, that ocean, where each kind 

Does straight its own resemblance find ; 

Yet it creates, transcending these, 

Far other worlds, and other seas ; 

Annihilating all that's made 

To a green thought in a green shade. 

Here at the fountain's sliding foot, 

Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, 

Casting the body's vest aside, 

My soul into the boughs does glide ; 

There, like a bird, it sits and sings, 

Then wets and claps its silver wings, 

And, till prepared for longer flight, 

Waves in its plumes the various light. 

How well the skilful gardener drew, 

Of flowers and herbs, this dial new ! 

Where, from above, the milder sun 

Does through a fragrant zodiac run : 

And, as it works, the industrious bee 

Computes its time as well as we. 

How could such sweet and wholesome hours 

Be reckon' d, but with herbs and flowers ?* 

The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like manner, 
fast vanishing. Most of them are dried up, or bricked over. Yet, 
where one is left, as in that little green nook behind the South- 
Sea House, what a freshness it gives to the dreary pile ! Four 
little winged marble boys used to play their virgin fancies, spout- 
ing out ever fresh streams from their innocent-wanton lips in the 
square of Lincoln's Inn, when I was no bigger than they were 
figured. They are gone, and the spring choked up. The fashion, 
they tell me, is gone by, and these things are esteemed childish. 
Why not then gratify children by letting them stand ? Lawyers, 
I suppose, were children once. They are awakening images to 

* From a copy of verses entitled The Garden. 



116 ELIA 

them at least. Why must everything smack of man and mannish ? 
Is the world all grown up ? Is childhood dead ? Or is there not 
in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart 
left, to respond to its earliest enchantments ? The figures were 
grotesque. Are the stifT-wigged living figures, that still flitter 
and chatter about that area, less Gothic in appearance ? or is the 
splutter of their hot rhetoric one-half so refreshing and innocent 
as the little cool playful streams those exploded cherubs uttered ? 

They have lately gothicised the entrance to the Inner Temple- 
hall, and the library front ; to assimilate them, I suppose, to the 
body of the hall, which they do not at all resemble. What is 
become of the winged horse that stood over the former ? a stately 
arms ! and who has removed those frescoes of the Virtues, which 
Italianized the end of the Paper-buildings ? — my first hint of alle- 
gory ! They must account to me for these things, which I miss 
so greatly. 

The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the parade ; 
but the traces are passed away of the footsteps which made its 
pavement awful ! It is become common and profane. The old 
benchers had it almost sacred to themselves, in the forepart of the 
day at least. They might not be sided or jostled. Their air 
and dress asserted the parade. You left wide spaces betwixt 
you, when you passed them. We walk on even terms with their 

successors. The rogueish eye of J 11, ever ready to be 

delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie a repartee 
with it. But what insolent familiar durst have mated Thomas 
Coventry ? — whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and 
elephantine, his face square as the lion's, his gait peremptory and 
path-keeping, indivertible from his way as a moving column, the 
scarecrow of his inferiors, the brow-beater of equals and supe- 
riors, who made a solitude of children wherever he came, for they 
fled his insufferable presence, as they would have shunned an 
Elisha bear. His growl was as thunder in their ears, whether he 
spake to them in mirth or in rebuke, his invitatory- notes being, 
indeed, of all, the most repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, 
aggravating the natural terrors of his speech, broke from each 
majestic nostril, darkening the air. He took it, not by pinches, 
but a palmful at once, diving for it under the mighty flaps of his 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 117 

old-fashioned waistcoat pocket ; his waistcoat red and angry, his 
coat dark rappee, tinctured by dye original, and by adjuncts, with 
buttons of obsolete gold. And so he paced the terrace. 

By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen ; the pen- 
sive gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and had 
nothing but that and their benchership in common. In politics 
Salt was a whig, and Coventry a staunch tory. Many a sarcastic 
growl did the latter cast out — for Coventry had a rough spinous 
humor — at the political confederates of his associate, which re- 
bounded from the gentle bosom of the latter like cannon-balls 
from wool. You could not ruffle Samuel Salt. 

S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, and of excel- 
lent discernment in the chamber practice of the law. I suspect 
his knowledge did not amount to much. When a case of difficult 
disposition of money, testamentary or otherwise, came before him, 
he ordinarily handed it over with a few instructions to his man 
Lovel, who was a quick little fellow, and would despatch it out 
of hand by the light of natural understanding, of which he had 
an uncommon share. It was incredible what repute for talents 
S. enjoyed by the mere trick of gravity. He was a shy man ; a 
child might pose him in a minute — indolent and procrastinating 
to the last degree. Yet men would give him credit for vast ap- 
plication, in spite of himself. He was not to be trusted with him- 
self with impunity. He never dressed for a dinner party but he 
forgot his sword — they wore swords then — or some other neces- 
sary part of his equipage. Lovel had his eye upon him on all 
these occasions, and ordinarily gave him his cue. If there was 
anything which he could speak unseasonably, he was sure to do 
it. — He was to dine at a relative's of the unfortunate MissBlandy 
on the day of her execution; — and L., who had a wary foresight 
of his probable hallucinations, before he set out, schooled him 
with great anxiety not in any possible manner to allude to her 
story that day. S. promised faithfully to observe the injunction. 
He had not been seated in the parlor, where the company was 
expecting the dinner summons, four minutes, when, a pause in 
the conversation ensuing, he got up. looked out of window, and 
pulling down his ruffles — an ordinary motion with him — observed, 
" it was a gloomy day," and added, " Miss Blandy must be hanged 



118 ELIA. 

by this time, I suppose." Instances of this sort were perpetual. 
Yet S. was thought by some of the greatest men of his time a fit 
person to be consulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the law, 
but in the ordinary niceties and embarrassments of conduct — from 
force of manner entirely. He never laughed. He had the same 
good fortune among the female world, — was a known toast with 
the ladies, and one or two are said to have died for love of him — 
I suppose, because he never trifled or talked gallantry with them, 
or paid them, indeed, hardly common attentions. He had a fine 
face and person, but wanted, methought, the spirit that should 
have shown them off with advantage to the women. His eye 
lacked lustre. — Not so, thought Susan P ; who, at the ad- 
vanced age of sixty, was seen, in the cold evening time, unaccom- 
panied, wetting the pavement of B d Row, with tears that fell 

in drops which might be heard, because her friend had died that 
day — he, whom she had pursued with a hopeless passion for the 
last forty years — a passion, which years could not extinguish or 
abate ; nor the long-resolved, yet gently-enforced, puttings off of 
unrelenting bachelorhood dissuade from its cherished purpose. 

Mild Susan P , thou hast now thy friend in heaven ! 

Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family of that name. 
He passed his youth in contracted circumstances, which gave him 
early those parsimonious habits which in after-life never forsook 
him ; so that, with one windfall or another, about the time I knew 
him he was master of four or five hundred thousand pounds ; nor 
did he look, or walk, worth a moidore less. He lived in a gloomy 
house opposite the pump in Serjeant's-inn, Fleet-street. J., the 
counsel, is doing self-imposed penance in it, for what reason I 
divine not, at this day. C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, 
where he seldom spent above a day or two at a time in the sum- 
mer ; but preferred, during the hot months, standing at his win- 
dow in this damp, close, well-like mansion, to watch, as he said, 
" the maids drawing water all day long." I suspect he had his 
within-door reasons for the preference. Hie currus et armafuere. 
He might think his treasures more safe. His house had the 
aspect of a strong-box. C. was a close hunks — a hoarder rather 
than a miser — or, if a miser, none of the mad Elwes breed, who 
have brought discredit upon a character, which cannot exist with- 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 119 

out certain admirable points of steadiness and unity of purpose. 
One may hate a true miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily de- 
spise him. By taking care of the pence, he is often enabled to 
part with the pounds, upon a scale that leaves us careless gene- 
rous fellows, halting at an immeasurable distance behind. C. gave 
away 30,000Z. at once in his life-time to a blind charity. His 
housekeeping was severely looked after, but he kept the table of 
a gentleman. He would know who came in and who went out of 
his house, but his kitchen chimney was never suffered to freeze. 

Salt w r as his opposite in this, as in all — never knew what he 
was worth in the world ; and having but a competency for his 
rank, which his indolent habits were little calculated to improve, 
might have suffered severely if he had not had honest people 
about him. Lovel took care of everything. He was at once his 
clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his " flapper, 5 ' his 
guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer. He did nothing without 
consulting Lovel, or failed in anything without expecting and 
fearing his admonishing. He put himself almost too much in his 
hands, had they not been the purest in the world. He resigned 
his title almost to respect as a master, if L. could ever have for- 
gotten for a moment that he was a servant. 

I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and 
losing honesty. A good fellow, withal, and "would strike." In 
the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or 
calculated the number of his opponents. He once wrested a sword 
out of the hand of a man of quality that had drawn upon him ; 
and pommelled him severely with the hilt of it. The swordsman 
had offered insult to a female — an occasion upon which no odds 
against him could have prevented the interference of Lovel. He 
would stand next day bareheaded to the same person, modestly 
to excuse his interference — for L. never forgot rank, where some- 
thing better was not concerned. L. was the liveliest little fellow 
breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said 
greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), 
possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry — next to Swift and 
p r i or — moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, 
by the dint of natural genius merely ; turned cribbage boards, 
and such small cabinet toys, to perfection ; took a hand at qua- 



ir 



120 ELIA. 

drille or bowls with equal facility ; made punch better than any 
man of his degree in England ; had the merriest quips and con- 
ceits ; and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions 
as you could desire. He was a brother of the angle, moreover, 
and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr. Izaak Wal- 
ton would have chosen to go a fishing with. I saw him in his 
old age and the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad 
stage of human weakness — " a remnant most forlorn of what he 
was," — yet even then his eye would light up upon the mention 
of his favorite Garrick. He was greatest, he would say, in 
Bayes — " was upon the stage nearly throughout the whole per- 
formance, and as busy as a bee." At intervals, too, he would 
speak of his former life, and how he came up a little boy from 
Lincoln to go to service, and how his mother cried at parting 
with him, and how he returned, after some few years' absence, 
in his smart new livery, to see her, and she blessed herself at the 
change, and could hardly be brought to believe that it was " her 
own bairn." And then, the excitement subsiding, he would weep, 
till I have wished that sad second-childhood might have a mother 
still to lay his head upon her lap. But the common mother of us 
all in no long time after received him gently into hers. 

With Coventry, and with Salt, in their walks upon the ter- 
race, most commonly Peter Pierson would join to make up a third. 
They did not walk linked arm in arm in those days — " as now 
our stout triumvirs sweep the streets," — but generally with both 
hands folded behind them for state, or with one at least behind, 
the other carrying a cane. P. was a benevolent, but not a pre- 
possessing man. He had that in his face which you could 
not term unhappiness ; it rather implied an incapacity of being 
happy. His cheeks were colorless even to whiteness. His look 
was uninviting, resembling (but without his sourness) that of our 
great philanthropist. I know that he did good acts, but I could 
never make out what he was. Contemporai^ with these, but 
subordinate, was Daines Barrington — another oddity — he walked 
burly and square — in imitation, I think, of Coventry — howbeit 
he attained not to the dignity of his prototype. Nevertheless, he 
did pretty well, upon the strength of being a tolerable antiquarian, 
and having a brother a bishop. When the account of his year's 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 121 

treasurership came to be audited, the following singular charge 
was unanimously disallowed by the bench : " Item, disbursed Mr. 
Allen, the gardener, twenty shillings, for stuff to poison the spar- 
rows, by my orders." Next to him was old Barton — a jolly ne- 
gation, who took upon him the ordering of the bills of fare for 
the parliament chamber, where the benchers dine — answering to 
the combination rooms at College — much to the easement of his 
less epicurean brethren. I know nothing more of him. — Then 
Read, and Twopeny, — Read, good-humored and personable — 
Twopeny, good-humored, but thin, and felicitous in jests upon 
his own figure. If T. was thin, Wharry was attenuated and 
fleeting. Many must remember him (for he was of rather 
later date) and his singular gait, which was performed by three 
steps and a jump regularly succeeding. The steps were little 
efforts, like that of a child beginning to walk ; the jump com- 
paratively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. Where he learned this 
figure, or what occasioned it, I could never discover. It was 
neither graceful in itself, nor seemed to answer the purpose any 
better than common walking. The extreme tenuity of his frame, 
I suspect, set him upon it. It was a trial of poising. Twopeny 
would often rally him upon his leanness, and hail him as Brother 
Liisty : but W. had no relish of a joke. His features were spite- 
ful. I have heard that he would pinch his cat's ears extremely, 
when anything had offended him. Jackson — the omniscient Jack- 
son as he was called — was of this period. He had the reputa- 
tion of possessing more multifarious knowledge than any man of 
. his time. He was the Friar Bacon of the less literate portion of 
the Temple. I remember a pleasant passage, of the cook apply- 
ing to him, with much formality of apology, for instructions how 
to write down edge bone of beef in his bill of commons. He 
was supposed to know, if any man in the world did. He decided 
the orthography to be — as I have given it — fortifying his author- 
ity with such anatomical reasons as dismissed the manciple (for 
the time) learned and happy. Some do spell it yet, perversely, 
aitch bone, from a fanciful resemblance between its shape and 
that of the aspirate so denominated. I had almost forgotten Min- 
gay with the iron hand — but he was somewhat later. He had 
Inst his right hand by some accident, and supplied it with a grap- 



122 ELI A. 

pling-hook, which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. I de- 
tected the substitute, before I was old enough to reason whether 
it were artificial or not. I remember the astonishment it raised 
in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking person ; and I recon- 
ciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an emblem of power — 
somewhat like the horns in the forehead of Michael Angelo's 
Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks (or did till very lately) in 
the costume of the reign of George the Second, closes my imper- 
fect recollections of the old benchers of the Inner Temple. 

Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled ? Or, if the like of you 
exist, why exist they no more for me ? Ye inexplicable, half- 
understood appearances, why comes in reason to tear away the 
preternatural mist, bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you ? Why 
make ye so sorry a figure in my relation, who made up to me — 
to my childish eyes — the mythology of the Temple ? In those 
days I saw Gods, as " old men covered with a mantle," walking 
upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish, — ex- 
tinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabling, in 
the heart of childhood, there will, for ever, spring up a well of 
innocent or wholesome superstition — the seeds of exaggeration 
will be busy there, and vital — from every-day forms educing the 
unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will 
be light, when the grown world flounders about in the darkness 
of sense and materiality. While childhood, and while dreams, 
reducing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have 
spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth. 

P. S. — I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel Salt. 
See what it is to trust to imperfect memory, and the erring notices 
of childhood ! Yet I protest I always thought that he had been a 
bachelor ! This gentleman, R. N. informs me, married young, 
and losing his lady in childbed, within the first year of their union, 
fell into a deep melancholy, from the effects of which, probably, 
he never thoroughly recovered. In what a new light does this 
place his rejection (O call it by a gentler name!) of mild Susan 

p 1 unravelling into beauty certain peculiarities of this very 

shy and retiring character ! — Henceforth let no one receive the 
narratives of Elia for true records ! They are, in truth, but 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 123 

shadows of fact — verisimilitudes, not verities— or sitting but upon 
the remote edges and outskirts of history. He is no such honest 
chronicler as R. N., and would have done better perhaps to have 
consulted that gentleman, before he sent these incondite reminis- 
cences to press. But the worthy sub-treasurer — who respects his 
old and his new masters — would but have been puzzled at the inde- 
corous liberties of Elia. The good man wots not, peradventure, 
of the license which Magazines have arrived at in this plain- 
speaking age, or hardly dreams of their existence beyond the 
Gentleman's — his furthest monthly excursions in this nature hav- 
ing been long confined to the holy ground of honest Urban 1 's 
obituary. May it be long before his own name shall help to 
swell those columns of unenvied flattery ! — Meantime, O ye New 
Benchers of the Inner Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is him- 
self the kindliest of human creatures. Should infirmities over- 
take him — he is yet in green and vigorous senility — make allow- 
ances for them, remembering that " ye yourselves are old." So 
may the Winged Horse, your ancient badge and cognisance, still 
flourish ! so may future Hookers and Seldens illustrate your church 
and chambers ! so may the sparrows, in default of more melodious 
quiristers, unpoisoned hop about your walks ! so may the fresh- 
colored and cleanly nursery-maid, who, by leave, airs her play- 
ful charge in your stately gardens, drop her prettiest blushing 
curtsy as ye pass, reductive of juvenescent emotion ! so may the 
younkers of this generation eye you, pacing your stately terrace, 
with the same superstitious veneration, with which the child Elia 
gazed on the Old Worthies that solemnised the parade before ye ! 



124 ELIA. 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT. 



The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its origin in 
the early times of the world, and the hunter-state of man, when 
dinners were precious things, and a full meal was something 
more than a common blessing ! when a belly-full was a wind- 
fall, and looked like a special providence. In the shouts and tri- 
umphal songs with which, after a season of sharp abstinence, a 
lucky booty of deer's or goat's flesh would naturally be ushered 
home, existed, perhaps, the germ of the modern grace. It is not 
otherwise easy to be understood, why the blessing of food — the 
act of eating — should have had a particular expression of thanks- 
giving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and silent grati- 
tude with which we are expected to enter upon the enjoyment of 
the many other various gifts and good things of existence. 

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other 
occasions in the. course of the day besides my dinner. I want a 
form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ram- 
ble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we 
none for books, those spiritual repasts — a grace before Milton — a 
grace before Shakspeare — a devotional exercise proper to be said 
before reading the Fairy Queen ? — but the received ritual having 
prescribed these forms to the solitary ceremony of manducation, 
I shall confine my observations to the experience which I have had 
of the grace, properly so called ; commending my new scheme 
for extension to a niche in the grand philosophical, poetical, and 
perchance in part heretical, liturgy, now compiling by my friend 
Homo Humanus, for the use of a certain snug congregation of 
Utopian Rabelsesian Christians, no matter where assembled. 

The form, then, of the benediction before eating has its beauty 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT. 125 

at a poor man's table, or at the simple and unprovocative repasts 
of children. It is here that the grace becomes exceedingly graceful. 
The indigent man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a 
meal the next day or not, sits down to his fare with a present 
sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, 
into whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, 
but by some extreme theory, have entered. The proper end of 
food — the animal sustenance — is barely contemplated by them. 
The poor man's bread is his daily bread, literally his bread for 
the day. Their courses are perennial. 

Again the plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded by the 
grace. That which is least stimulative to appetite, leaves the 
mind most free for foreign considerations. A man may feel 
thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of plain mutton with tur- 
nips, and have leisure to reflect upon the ordinance and institution 
of eating ; when he shall confess a perturbation of mind, incon- 
sistent with the purposes of the grace, at the presence of venison 
or turtle. When I have sate (a rarus hospes) at rich men's tables, 
with the savory soup and messes steaming up the nostrils, and 
moistening the lips of the guests with desire and a distracted 
choice, I have felt the introduction of that ceremony to be unsea- 
sonable. With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems imper- 
tinent to interpose a religious sentiment. It is a confusion of 
purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters. The 
heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion. The 
incense which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts 
it for his own. The very excess of the provision beyond the 
needs, takes away all the sense of proportion between the end 
and means. The giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled 
at the injustice of returning thanks — for what ? — for having too 
much, while so many starve. It is to paise the Gods amiss. 

I have observed this awkwardness felt, scarce consciously per- 
haps, by the good man who says the grace. I have seen it in 
clergymen and others — a sort of shame — a sense of the co-pre- 
sence of circumstances which unhallow the blessing. After a 
devotional tone put on for a few seconds, how rapidly the speaker 
will fall into his common voice ! helping himself or his neighbor, 
as if to get rid of some uneasy sensation of hypocrisy. Not that 



126 ELIA. 

the good man was a hypocrite, or was not most conscientious in 
the discharge of the duty ; but he felt in his inmost mind the 
incompatibility of the scene and the viands before him with the 
exercise of a calm and rational gratitude. 

I hear somebody exclaim, — Would you have Christians sit 
down at table, like hogs to their troughs, without remembering the 
Giver ! — no — I would have them sit down as Christians, remem- 
bering the Giver, and less like hogs. Or if their appetites must 
run riot, and they must pamper themselves with delicacies for 
which east and west are ransacked, I would have them post- 
pone their benediction to a fitter season, when appetite is laid ; 
when the still small voice can be heard, and the reason of the 
grace returns — with temperate diet and restricted dishes. Glut- 
tony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving. 
When Jeshurun waxed fat, we read that he kicked. Virgil 
knew the harpy-nature better, when he put into the mouth of 
Celaeno anything but a blessing. We may be gratefully sensible 
of the deliciousness of some kinds of food beyond others, though 
that is a meaner and inferior gratitude : but the proper object of 
the grace is sustenance, not relishes ; daily bread, not delicacies ; 
the means of life, and not the means of pampering the carcass. 
With what frame or composure, I wonder, can a city chaplain 
pronounce his benediction at some great Hall-feast, when he 
knows that his last concluding pious word — and that in all pro- 
bability, the sacred name which he preaches — is but the signal 
for so many impatient harpies to commence their foul orgies, with 
as little sense of true thankfulness (which is temperance) as those 
Virgilian fowl ! It is well if the good man himself does not feel 
his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling 
with and polluting the pure altar sacrifice. 

The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the banquet 
which Satan, in the Paradise Regained, provides for a temptation 
in the wilderness : 

A table richly spread in regal mode 
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort 
And savor ; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, 
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, 
Gris-amber-steamed ; all fish from sea or shore, 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT. 127 

Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained 
Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. 

The Tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would go 
down without the recommendatory preface of a benediction. They 
are like to be short graces where the devil plays the host. I am 
afraid the poet wants his usual decorum in this place. Was he 
thinking of the old Roman luxury, or of a gaudy day at Cam- 
bridge ? This was a temptation fitter for a Heliogabalus. The 
whole banquet is too civic and culinary, and the accompaniments 
altogether a profanation of that deep, abstracted holy scene. The 
mighty artillery of sauces, which the cook-fiend conjures up, is 
out of proportion to the simple wants and plain hunger of the 
guest. He that disturbed him in his dreams, from his dreams 
might have been taught better. To the temperate fantasies of 
the famished Son of God, what sort of feasts presented themselves ? 
He dreamed indeed, 

As appetite is wont to dream, 

Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment sweet. 

But what meats ? — 

Him thought, he by the brook of Cherith stood, 

And saw the ravens with their horny beak3 

Food to Elijah bringing even and morn ; 

Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought : 

He saw the prophet also how he fled 

Into the desert and how there he slept 

Under a juniper ; then how awaked 

He found his supper on the coals prepared, 

And by the angel was bid rise and eat, 

And ate the second time after repose, 

The strength whereof sufficed him forty days . 

Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook, 

Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse. 

Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate dreams 
of the divine Hungerer. To which of these two visionary ban- 
quets, think you, would the introduction of what is called the 
grace have been the most fitting and pertinent V 

Theoretically I am no enemy to graces ; but practically I own 



128 ELIA. 

that (before meat especially) they seem to involve something 
awkward and unseasonable. Our appetites, of one or another 
kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which might otherwise 
but feebly set about the great ends of preserving and continuing 
the species. They are fit blessings to be contemplated at a dis- 
tance with a becoming gratitude ; but the moment of appetite 
(the judicious reader will apprehend me) is, perhaps, the least fit 
season for that exercise. The Quakers, who go about their busi- 
ness of every description with more calmness than we, have more 
title to the use of these benedictory prefaces. I have always 
admired their silent grace, and the more because I have observed 
their applications to the meat and drink following to be less pas- 
sionate and sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons nor 
wine- bibbers as a people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopped 
hay, with indifference, calmness, and cleanly circumstances. 
They neither grease nor slop themselves. When I see a citizen 
in his bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice. 

I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to 
the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's flesh were not 
made to be received with dispassionate services. I hate a man 
who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is eating. I sus- 
pect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one 
who professes to like minced veal. There is a physiognomical 

character in the tastes for food. C holds that a man cannot 

have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain 
but he is right. With the decay of my first innocence, I confess 
a less and less relish daily for those innocuous cates. The whole 
vegetable tribe have lost their gust with me. Only I stick to 
asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. I am 
impatient and querulous under culinary disappointments, as to 
come home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting some savory 
mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill 
melted — that commonest of kitchen failures — puts me beside my 
tenor. The author of the Rambler used to make inarticulate 
animal noises over a favorite food. Was this the music quite 
proper to be preceded by the grace 1 or would the pious man 
have done betur to postpone his devotions to a season when the 
blessing might be contemplated with less perturbation ? I quarrel 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT. 129 

with no man's tastes, nor would set my thin face against those 
excellent things, in their way, jollity and feasting. But as these 
exercises, however laudable, have little in them of grace or grace- 
fulness, a man should be sure, before he ventures so to grace 
them, that while he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is 
not secretly kissing his hand to some great fish — his Dagon — 
with a special consecration of no ark but the fat tureen before 
him. Graces are the sweet preluding strains to the banquets of 
angels and children ; to the roots and severer repasts of the 
Chartreuse ; to the slender, but not slenderly acknowledged, refec- 
tion of the poor and humble man : but at the heaped-up boards 
of the pampered and the luxurious they become of dissonant mood, 
less timed and tuned to the occasion, methinks, than the noise of 
those better befitting organs would be which children hear tales 
of, at Hog's Norton. We sit too long at our meals, or are too 
curious in the study of them, or too disordered in our application 
to them, or engross too great a portion of those good things (which 
should be common) to our share, to be able with any grace to say 
grace. To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our pro- 
portion^ is to add hypocrisy to injustice. A lurking sense of this 
truth is what makes the performance of this duty so cold and 
spiritless a service at most tables. In houses where the grace is 
as indispensable as the napkin, who has not seen that never-set- 
tled question arise, as to tolio shall say it ? while the good man of 
the house and the visitor clergyman, or some other guest belike 
of next authority, from years or gravity, shall be bandying about 
the office between them as a matter of compliment, each of them 
not unwilling to shift the awkward burthen of an equivocal duty 
from his own shoulders ? 

I once drank tea in company with two Methodist divines of differ- 
ent persuasions, whom it was my fortune to introduce to each other 
for the first time that evening. Before the first cup was handed 
round, one of these reverend gentlemen put it to the other, with 
all due solemnity, whether he chose to say anything. It seems it 
is the custom with some sectaries to put up a short prayer before 
this meal also. His reverend brother did not at first quite appre- 
hend him, but upon an explanation, with little less importance he 
made answer that it was not a custom known in his church : in 
10 



130 ELIA. 

which courteous evasion the other acquiescing for good manners' 
sake, or in compliance with a weak brother, the supplementary 
or tea-grace was waived altogether. With what spirit might not 
Lucian have painted two priests, of his religion, playing into each 
other's hands the compliment of performing or omitting a sacri- 
fice, — the hungry God meantime, doubtful of his incense, with 
expectant nostrils hovering over the two flamens, and (as between 
two stools) going away in the end without his supper ! 

A short form upon these occasions is felt to want reverence ; a 
long one, I am afraid, cannot escape the charge of impertinence. 
I do not quite approve of the epigrammatic conciseness with 
which that equivocal wag (but my pleasant school-fellow) C. V. 
L., when importuned for a grace, used to inquire, first slily leer- 
ing down the table, " Is there no clergyman here," — significantly 
adding, " Thank G — ." Nor do I think our old form at school 
quite pertinent, where we were used to preface our bald bread-and- 
cheese-suppers with a preamble, connecting with that humble 
blessing a recognition of benefits the most awful and overwhelm- 
ing to the imagination which religion has to offer. Non tunc illis 
erat locus. I remember we were put to it to reconcile the phrase 
" good creatures, 3 ' upon which the blessing rested, with the fare 
set before us, wilfully understanding that expression in a low 
and animal sense, — till some one recalled a legend, which told 
how, in the golden days of Christ's, the young Hospitallers were 
wont to have smoking joints of roast meat upon their nightly 
boards, till some pious benefactor, commiserating the decencies, 
rather than the palates, of the children, commuted our flesh for 
garments, and gave us- — horresco referens — trousers instead of 
mutton. 



DREAM-CHILDREN; A REVERIE. 131 



DREAM-CHILDREN; A REVERIE. 



Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when they 
were children ; to stretch their imagination to the conception of 
a traditionary great-uncle, or grandame, whom they never saw. 
It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other 
evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in 
a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in 
which they and papa lived) which had been the scene — so at 
least it was generally believed in that part of the country — of 
the tragic incidents which they had lately become familiar with 
from the ballad of the Children in the Wood. Certain it is that 
the whole story of the children and their cruel uncle was to be 
seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the 
great-hall, the whole story down to the Robin Redbreasts; till 
a foolish rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of 
modern invention in its stead, w T ith no story upon it. Here Alice 
put out one of her dear mother's looks, too tender to be called 
upbraiding. Then I went on to say, how religious and how 
good their great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and re- 
spected by everybody, though she was not indeed the mistress 
of this great house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in 
some respects she might be said- to be the mistress of it too) 
committed to her by the owner, who preferred living in a newer 
and more fashionable mansion which he had purchased some- 
where in the adjoining county ; but still she lived in it in a 
manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity of 
the great house in a sort while she lived, which afterwards 
came to decay, and was nearly pulled down, and all its old 
ornaments stripped and carried away to the owner's other house, 



132 ELIA. 

where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if some one 
were to carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Ab- 
bey, and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. 
Here John smiled, as much as to say, " that would be foolish 
indeed." And then I tbld how, when she came to die, her fune- 
ral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the 
gentry, too, of the neighborhood, for many miles round, to show 
their respect for her memory, because she had been such a 
good and religious woman ; so good indeed that she knew all the 
Psaltery by heart, ay, and a great part of the Testament besides. 
Here little Alice spread her hands. Then I told what a tall, up- 
right, graceful person their great-grandmother Field once was ; 
and how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancer — here 
Alice's little right foot played an involuntary movement, till, upon 
my looking grave, it desisted — the best dancer, I was saying, in 
the county, till a cruel disease, called a cancer, came, and 
bowed her down with pain ; but it could never bend her good 
spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright, because 
she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was used 
to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great lone house ; 
and how she believed that an apparition of two infants was to 
be seen at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase near 
where she slept, but she said " those innocents would do her no 
harm;" and how frightened I used to be, though in those days 
I had my maid to sleep with me, because I was never half so 
good or religious as she — and yet I never saw the infants. Here 
John expanded all his eyebrows and tried to look courageous. 
Then I told how good she was to all her grandchildren, having 
us to the great house in the holidays, where I in particular used 
to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts of 
the twelve Csesars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till the old 
marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into 
marble with them ; how I could never be tired with roaming 
about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms, with their 
worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken pan- 
nels, with the gilding almost rubbed out — sometimes in the spa- 
cious old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself, unless 
when now and then a solitary gardening man would cross me — 



DREAM-CHILDREN; A REVERIE. 133 

and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, 
without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were 
forbidden fruit, unless now and then, — -and because I had more 
pleasure m strolling about among the old melancholy-looking 
yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red-berries, and the 
fir- apples, which were good for nothing but to look at — or in 
lying about upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden 
smells around me — or basking in the orangery, till I could 
almost fancy myself ripening too along with the oranges and 
the limes in that grateful warmth — or in watching the dace 
that darted to and fro in the fish pond, at the bottom of the 
garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging mid- 
way down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their im- 
pertinent friskings ; I had more pleasure in these busy-idle diver- 
sions than in all the sweet flavors of peaches, nectarines, oranges, 
and such-like common baits of children. Here John slily depo- 
sited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, not unob- 
served by Alice, he had meditated dividing with her, and both 
seemed willing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. 
Then, in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, though 
their great-grandmother Field loved all her grand-children, yet in 
an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John 

L , because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a 

king to the rest of us ; and, instead of moping about in solitary 
corners, like some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome 
horse he could get, when but an imp no bigger than themselves, 
and make it carry him half over the county in a morning, and 
join the hunters when there were any out ; and yet he loved the 
old great house and gardens too, but had too much spirit to be 
always pent up within their boundaries — and how their uncle 
grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to the ad- 
miration of everybody, but of their great-grandmother Field 
most especially ; and how he used to carry me upon his back 
when I was a lame-footed boy — for he was a good bit older than 
me — many a mile when I could not walk for pain ; and how in 
after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not always (I fear) 
make allowances enough for him when he was impatient, and in 
pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate he had been tn 



134 ELIA. 

me when I was lame-footed ; and how when he died, though he 
had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great 
while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death; and 
how I bore his death as I thought pretty well at first, but after- 
wards it haunted and haunted me ; and though I did not cry or 
take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if 
I had died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then P , 
how much I had loved him. I missed his kindness, and I missed 
his crossness, and wished him to be alive again, to be quarrelling 
with him (for we quarrelled sometimes), rather than not have him 
again, and was as uneasy without him, as he their poor uncle 
must have been when the doctor took off his limb. Here the 
children fell a crying, and asked if their little mourning which 
they had on was not for uncle John, and they looked up, and 
prayed me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them some 
stories about their pretty dead mother. Then I told how for seven 
long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persist- 
ing ever, I courted the fair Alice W — n ; and, as much as chil- 
dren could understand, I explained to them what coyness, and 
difficulty, and denial, meant in maidens — when suddenly, turning 
to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with 
such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of 
them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was ; and 
while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to 
my view, receding, and still receding, till nothing at last but two 
mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, 
without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of 
speech : " We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children 
at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are 
nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might 
have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe mil 

lions of ages before we have existence, and a name " and 

immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bache- 
lor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget 
unchanged by my side; but John L. (or James Elia) was gone 
for ever. 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS 135 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. 

IN A LETTER TO B. F., ESQ., AT SIDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES. 



My dear F. — When I think how welcome the sight of a letter 
from the world where you were born must be to you in that 
strange one to which you have been transplanted, I feel some 
compunctious visitings at my long silence. But, indeed, it is no 
easy effort to set about a correspondence at our distance. The 
weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination. It 
is difficult to conceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch 
across it. It is a sort of presumption to expect that one's thoughts 
should live so far. It is like writing for posterity ; and reminds 
me of one of Mrs. Rowe's superscriptions, " Alcander to Strephon 
in the shades." Cowley's Post- Angel is no more than would be 
expedient in such an intercourse. One drops a packet at Lorn- 
bard-street, and in twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland gets 
it as fresh as if it came in ice. It is only like whispering through 
a Long trumpet. But suppose a tube let down from the moon, 
with yourself at one end, and the man at the other ; it would be 
some balk to the spirit of conversation, if you knew that the dia- 
logue exchanged with that interesting theosophist would take two 
or three revolutions of a higher luminary in its passage. Yet for 
aught I know, you may be some parasangs nigher that primitive 
idea — Plato's man — than we in England here have the honor to 
reckon ourselves. 

Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics ; news, sen- 
timent, and puns. In the latter, I include all non-serious sub- 
jects ; or subjects serious in themselves, but treated after my 
fashion, non-seriously. — And first, for news. In them the most 



136 ELIA. 

desirable circumstance, I suppose, is that they shall be true. But 
what security can I have that what I now send you for truth shall 
not, before you get it, unaccountably turn into a lie I For in- 
stance, our mutual friend P. is at this present writing — my Now 
— in good health, and enjoys a fair share of worldly reputation. 
You are glad to hear it. This is natural and friendly. But at 
this present reading — your Now — he may possibly be in the 
Bench, or going to be hanged, which in reason ought to abate 
something of your transport (£. e. at hearing he was well, &c), 
or at least considerably to modify it. I am going to the play this 
evening, to have a laugh with Munden. You have no theatre, I 
think you told me, in your land of d— d realities. You natu- 
rally lick your lips, and envy me my felicity. Think but a mo- 
ment, and you will correct the hateful emotion. Why it is Sun- 
day morning with you, and 1823. This confusion of tenses, this 
grand solecism of two presents, is in a degree common to all 
postage. But if I sent you word to Bath or Devizes, that I 
was expecting the aforesaid treat this evening, though at the 
moment you received the intelligence my full feast of fun would 
be over, yet there would be for a day or two after, as you would 
well know, a smack, a relish left upon my mental palate, which 
would give rational encouragement for you to foster a portion at 
least of the disagreeable passion, which it was in part my inten- 
tion to produce. But ten months hence, your envy or your sym- 
pathy would be as useless as a passion spent upon the dead. 
Not only does truth, in these long intervals, un-essence herself, 
but (what is harder) one cannot venture a crude fiction, for the 
fear that it may ripen into a truth upon the voyage. What a 
wild improbable banter I put upon you some three years since 
of Will Weatherall having married a servant-maid ! I re- 
member gravely consulting you how we were to receive her — 
for Will's wife was in no case to be rejected ; and your no less 
serious replication in the matter ; how tenderly you advised an 
abstemious introduction of literary topics before the lady, with a 
caution not to be too forward in bringing on the carpet matters 
more within the sphere of her intelligence ; your deliberate judg- 
ment, or rather wise suspension of sentence, how far jacks, and 
spits, and mops, could with propriety be introduced as subjects ; 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. 137 

whether the conscious avoiding of all sucli matters in discourse 
would not have a worse look than the taking of them casually in 
our way ; in what manner we should carry ourselves to our 
maid Becky, Mrs. William Weatherall being by ; whether we 
should show more delicacy, and a truer sense of respect for Will's 
wife, by treating Becky with our customary chiding before her, 
or by an unusual deferential civility paid to Becky as to a person 
of great worth, but thrown by the caprice of fate into an humble 
station. There were difficulties, 1 remember, on both sides, 
which you did me the favor to state with the precision of a law- 
yer, united to the tenderness of a friend. I laughed in my sleeve 
at your solemn pleadings, when lo ! while I was valuing myself 
upon this flam put upon you in New South Wales, the devil in 
England, jealous possibly of any lie-children not his own, or 
working after my copy, has actually instigated our friend (not 
three days since) to the commission of a matrimony, which T had 
only conjured up for your diversion. William Weatherall has 
married Mrs. Cotterel's maid. But to take it in its truest sense, 
you will see my dear F., that news from me must become history 
.0 you ; which I neither profess to write, nor indeed care much 
for reading. No person under a diviner, can with any prospect 
of veracity conduct a correspondence at such an arm's length. 
Two prophets, indeed, might thus interchange intelligence with 
effect ; the epoch of the writer (Habbakuk) falling in with the 
true present time of the receiver (Daniel) ; but then we are no 
prophets. 

Then as to sentiment. It fares little better with that. This 
kind of dish, above all, requires to be served up hot ; or sent off 
in water-plates, that your friend may have it almost as warm as 
yourself. If it have time to cool, it is the most tasteless of all cold 
meats. I have often smiled at a conceit of the late Lord C. It 
seems that travelling somewhere about Geneva, he came to some 
pretty green spot, or nook, where a willow or something hung so 
fantastically and invitingly over a stream — was it ? — or a rock ? 
— no matter — but the stillness and the repose, after a weary jour- 
ney 'tis likely, in a languid moment of his Lordship's hot restless 
life, so took his fancy that he could imagine no place so proper, 
in the event of his death, to lay his bones in This was all very 



133 ELIA. 

natural and excusable as a sentiment, and shows his character in 
a very pleasing light. But when from a passing sentiment it 
came to be an act ; and when, by a positive testamentary dis- 
posal, his remains were actually carried all that way from Eng- 
land ; who was there, some desperate sentimentalist excepted, that 
did not ask the question, Why could not his lordship have found 
a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree as green and pendent, 
with a stream as emblematic to his purpose, in Surrey, in Dorset, 
or in Devon ? Conceive the sentiment boarded up, freighted, 
entered at the Custom House (startling the tide-waiters with the 
novelty), hoisted into a ship. Conceive it pawed about and 
handled between the rude jests of tarpaulin ruffians — a thing of 
its delicate texture — the salt bilge wetting it till it became as 
vapid as a damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger 
(mariners have some superstition about sentiment) of being tossed 
over in a fresh gale to some propitiatory shark (spirit of Saint 
Gothard, save us from a quietus so foreign to the deviser's pur- 
pose !) but it has happily evaded a fishy consummation. Trace 
it then to its lucky landing — at Lyons shall we say ? — I have not 
the map before me — jostled upon four men's shoulders — baiting 
at this town — stopping to refresh at t'other village — waiting a 
passport here, a license there ; the sanction of the magistracy in 
this district, the concurrence of the ecclesiastics in that canton ; 
till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from 
a brisk sentiment, into a feature of silly pride or tawdry senseless 
affectation. How few sentiments, my dear F., I am afraid we 
can set down, in the sailor's phrase, as quite sea- worthy. 

Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which, though contempti- 
ble in bulk, are the twinkling corpuscula which should irradiate 
a right friendly epistle — your puns and small jests are, I appre- 
hend, extremely circumscribed in their sphere of action. They 
are so far from a capacity of being packed up and sent beyond 
sea, they will scarce endure to be transported by hand from this 
room to the next. Their vigor is as the instant of their birth. 
Their nutriment for their brief existence is the intellectual atmo- 
sphere of the bystanders : or this last is the fine slime of Nilus — 
the melior lulus — whose maternal recipiency is as necessary as 
the sol pater to their equivocal generation. A pun hath a hearty 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. 139 

kind of present ear-kissing smack with it ; you can no more trans- 
mit it in its pristine flavor, than you can send a kiss. — Have you 
not tried in some instances to palm off a yesterday's pun upon a 
gentleman, and has it answered ? Not but it was new to his hear- 
ing, but it did not seem to come new from you. It did not hitch 
in. It was like picking up at a village ale-house a two-days'-old 
newspaper. You have not seen it before, but you resent the stale 
thing as an affront. This sort of merchandise above all requires 
a quick return. A pun, and its recognitory laugh, must be co- 
instantaneous. The one is the brisk lightning, the other the 
fierce thunder. 

A moment's interval, and the link is snapped. A pun is re- 
flected from a friend's face as from a mirror. Who would con- 
sult his sweet visnomy, if the polished surface were two or three 
minutes (not to speak of twelve months, my dear F.) in giving 
back its copy ? 

I cannot image to myself whereabouts you are. When I try 
to fix it, Peter Wilkins's island comes across me. Sometimes you 
seem to be in the Hades of Thieves. I see Diogenes prying 
among you with his perpetual fruitless lantern. What must you 
be willing by this time to give for the sight of an honest man ! 
You must almost have forgotten how we look. And tell me, what 
your Sydneyites do ? are they th**v*ng all day long ? Merciful 
heaven ? what property can stand against such a depredation ! 
The kangaroos — your Aborigines — do they keep their primitive 
simplicity un-Europe tainted, with those little short fore puds, 
looking like a lesson formed by nature to the pickpocket ! Marry, 
for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided a priori ; but 
if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair 
of hand-shifters as the expertest loco-motor in the colony. We 
hear the most improbable tales at this distance. Pray is it true 
that the young Spartans among you are born with six fingers, 
which spoils their scanning ? It must look very odd ; but use 
reconciles. For their scansion, it is less to be regretted, for if they 
take it into their heads to be poets, it is odds but they turn out, 
the greater part of them, vile plagiarists. Is there much differ- 
ence to see, too, between the son of a th**f, and the grandson ? 
or where does the taint stop ? Do you bleach in three or four 



140 ELI A. 

generations? I have many questions to put, but ten Delphic 
voyages can be made in a shorter time than it will take to satisfy 
my scruples. Do you grow your own hemp ? What is your 
staple trade, — exclusive of the national profession, I mean ? 
Your locksmiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists. 

I am insensibly chatting to you as familiarly as when we used 
to exchange good-morrows out of our old contiguous windows, in 
pump-famed Hare-court in the Temple. Why did you ever leave 
that quiet corner ? — Why did I ? — with its complement of four 
poor elms, from whose smoke-dried barks, the theme of jesting 
ruralists, I picked my first lady-birds ! My heart is as dry as 
that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert 
to the space that is between us ; a length of passage enough to 
render obsolete the phrases of our English letters before they can 
reach you. But while I talk, I think you hear me, thoughts dal- 
lying with vain surmise — 

Aye me ! while thee the seas and sounding shores 
Hold far away. 

Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as you 
shall hardly know me. Come, before Bridget walks on crutches. 
Girls whom you left children have become sage matrons while 
you are tarrying there. The blooming Miss W— r (you remem- 
ber Sally W — r) called upon us yesterday, an aged crone. Folks, 
whom you knew, die off every year. Formerly, I thought that 
death was wearing out, — I stood ramparted about with so many 
healthy friends. The departure of J. W.,two springs back, cor- 
rected my delusion. Since then the old divorcer has been busy. 

If you do not make haste to return, there will be little left to 
greet you, of me, or mine. 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. 141 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. 



I like to meet a sweep— understand me — not a grown sweeper 
— old chimney-sweepers are by no means attractive— but one of 
those tender novices, blooming through their first nigritude, the 
maternal washings not quite effaced from the cheek— such as come 
forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little profes- 
sional notes sounding like the peep peep of a young sparrow ; or 
liker to the matin lark should I pronounce them, in their aerial 
accents not seldom anticipating the sun-rise 1 

I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks — poor blots 
— innocent blacknesses — 

I reverence these young Africans of our own growth — these 
almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assumption ; 
and from their little pulpits (the tops of the chimneys), in the 
nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of patience 
to mankind. 

When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to witness 
their operation ! to see a chit no bigger than one's-self, enter, one 
knew not by what process, into what seemed the fauces Avend 
— to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on through 
so many dark stifling caverns, horrid shades ! — to shudder with 
the idea that " now, surely, he must be lost for ever !" — to revive 
at hearing his feeble shout of discovered day-light — and then (O 
fulness of delight !) running out of doors, to come just in time to 
see the sable phenomenon emerge in safety, the brandished 
weapon of his art victorious like some flag waved over a conquer- 
ed citadel ! I seem to remember having been told, that a bad 
sweep was once left in a stack with a brush, to indicate which 
way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle certainly ; not 



142 ELIA. 

much unlike the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the " Ap 
parition of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, rises." 

Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early 
rambles, it is good to give him a penny. It is better to give him 
two-pence. If it be starving weather, and to the proper troubles 
of his hard occupation, a pair of kibed heels (no unusual accom- 
paniment) be superadded, the demand on thy humanity will surely 
rise to a tester. 

There is a composition, the ground- work of which I have un- 
derstood to be the sweet wood 'yclept sassafras. This wood boil- 
ed down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of mill* 
and sugar, hath to some tastes a delicacy beyond the China luxu- 
ry. I know not how thy palate may relish it ; for myself, 
with every deference to the judicious Mr. Read, who hath time 
out of mind kept open a shop (the only one he avers in London) 
for the vending of this " wholesome and pleasant beverage," on 
the south side of Fleet-street, as thou approachest Bridge-street — 
the only Salopian house — I have never yet ventured to dip my 
own particular lip in a basin of his commended ingredients — a 
cautious premonition to the olfactories constantly whispering to 
me, that my stomach must infallibly, with all due courtesy, de- 
cline it. Yet I have seen palates, otherwise not uninstructed in 
dietetical elegancies, sup it up with avidity. 

I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it 
happens, but I have always found that this composition is surpris- 
ingly gratifying to the palate of a young chimney-sweeper — 
whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly oleaginous) do at- 
tenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, which are sometimes 
found (in dissections) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these 
unfledged practitioners ; or whether Nature, sensible that she had 
mingled too much of bitter wood in the lot of these raw victims, 
caused to grow out of the earth her sassafras for a sweet lenitive 
— but so it is, that no possible taste or odor to the sense of a young 
chimney sweeper can convey a delicate excitement comparable to 
this mixture. Being penniless, they will yet hang their black 
heads over the ascending steam, to gratify one sense if possible, 
seemingly no less pleased than those domestic animals — cats — 
when they purr over a new found sprig of valerian. There is 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. 143 

something more in these sympathies than philosophy can in- 
culcate. 

Now albeit Mr. Read boasteth, not without reason, that his is 
the only Salopian house ; yet be it known to thee, reader — if thou 
art one who keepest what are called good hours, thou art haply 
ignorant of the fact — he hath a race of industrious imitators, who 
from stalls, and under open sky, dispense the same savory mess 
to humbler customers, at that dead time of the dawn, when (as 
extremes meet) the rake, reeling home from his midnight cups, 
and the hard-handed artisan leaving his bed to resume the pre- 
mature labors of the day, jostle, not unfrequently to the manifest 
disconcerting of the former, for the honors of the pavement. .It 
is the time when, in summer, between the expired and the not yet 
relumined kitchen-fires, the kennels of our fair metropolis give 
forth their least satisfactory odors. The rake, who wisheth to 
dissipate his o'er-night vapors in more grateful coffee, curses the 
ungenial fume, as he passeth ; but the artisan stops to taste, and 
blesses the fragrant breakfast. 

This is saloop — the precocious herb-woman's darling — the de- 
light of the early gardener, who transports his smoking cabbages 
by break of day from Hammersmith to Co vent-garden's famed 
piazzas — the delight, and oh ! I fear, too often the envy, of the un- 
pennied sweep. Him shouldst thou haply encounter, with his dim 
visage pendent over the grateful steam, regale him with a sump- 
tuous basin (it will cost thee but three-halfpennies) and a slice 
of delicate bread and butter (an added halfpenny) — so may thy 
culinary fires, eased of the o'er-charged secretions from thy worse- 
placed hospitalities, curl up a lighter volume to the welkin — so 
may the descending soot never taint thy costly well-ingredienced 
soups — nor the odious cry, quick-reaching from street to street, of 
the fired chimney ', invite the rattling engines from ten adjacent 
parishes, to disturb for a casual scintillation thy peace and pocket ! 

I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts ; the 
jeers and taunts of the populace ; the low-bred triumph they dis- 
play over the casual trip, or splashed stocking, of a gentleman. 
Yet can I endure the jocularity of a young sweep with something 
more than forgiveness. — In the last winter but one, pacing along 
Cheapside with my accustomed precipitation when I walked west- 



144 EL1A. 

ward, a treacherous slide brought me upon my back in an instant. 
I scrambled up with pain and shame enough — yet outwardly try- 
ing to face it down, as if nothing had happened — when the roguish 
grin of one of these young wits encountered me. There he 
stood, pointing me out with his dusky finger to the mob r and to 
a poor woman (I suppose his mother) in particular, till the tears 
for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked them- 
selves out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red from many 
a previous weeping, and soot-infiamed, yet twinkling through all 

with such a joy, snatched out of desolation, that Hogarth — . 

But Hogarth has got him already (how could he miss him?) 

in the March to Finchley, grinning at the pye-man there he 

stood, as he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest was 
to last for ever — with such a maximum of glee, and minimum 
of mischief, in his mirth — for the grin of a genuine sweep hath 
absolutely no malice in it — that I could have been content, if 
the honor of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained 
his butt and his mockery till midnight. 

I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are 
called a fine set of teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies 
must pardon me) is a casket presumably holding such jewels : 
but, methinks, they should take leave to " air" them as frugally 
as possible. The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me their 
teeth, show me bones. Yet must I confess, that from the mouth 
of a true sweep a display (even to ostentation) of those white and 
shining ossifications, strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in man- 
ners, and an allowable piece of foppery. It is, as when 

A sable-cloud 
Turns forth her silver lining on the night. 

It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct ; a badge of 
better days ; a hint of nobility : — and, doubtless, under the ob- 
scuring darkness and double night of their forlorn disguisement, 
oftentimes lurketh good blood, and gentle conditions, derived from 
lost ancestry, and a lapsed pedigree. The premature apprentice* 
ments of those tender victims give but too much encouragement 
I fear, to clandestine and almost infantile abductions ; the seeds 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. 145 

of civility and true courtesy, so often discernible in these young 
grafts (not otherwise to be accounted for) plainly hint at some 
forced adoptions ; many noble Rachels mourning for their chil- 
dren, even in our days, countenance the fact ; the tales of fairy- 
spiriting may shadow a lamentable verity, and the recovery of the 
young Montagu be but a solitary instance of good fortune out of 
many irreparable and hopeless defiliations. 

In one of the state-beds at Arundel Castle, a few years since — 
under a ducal canopy — (that seat of the Howards is an object 
of curiosity to visitors, chiefly for its beds, in which the late duke 
was especially a connoisseur) — encircled with curtains of delicat- 
est crimson, with starry coronets inwoven — folded between a pair 
of sheets whiter and softer than the lap where Venus lulled As- 
canius — was discovered by chance, after all methods of search 
had failed, at noon-day, fast asleep, a lost chimney-sweeper. The 
little creature, having somehow confounded his passage among 
the intricacies of those lordly chimneys, by some unknown aper- 
ture had alighted upon this magnificent chamber ; and, tired 
with his tedious explorations, was unable to resist the delicious 
invitement to repose, which he there saw exhibited ; so creep- 
ing between the sheets very quietly, laid his black head upon 
the pillow, and slept like a young Howard. 

Such is the account given to the visitors at the Castle. — But I 
cannot help seeming to perceive a confirmation of what I have 
just hinted at in this story. A high instinct was at w r ork in the 
case, or I am mistaken. Is it probable that a poor child of that 
description, with whatever weariness he might be visited would 
have ventured, under such a penalty as he would be taught to 
expect, to uncover the sheets of a Duke's bed, and deliberately to 
lay himself down between them, when the rug or the carpet pre- 
sented an obvious couch, still far above his pretensions — is this 
probable, I would ask, if the great power of nature, which I con- 
tend for, had not been manifested within him, prompting to the 
adventure ? Doubtless this young nobleman (for such my mind 
misgives me that he must be) was allured by some memory, not 
amounting to full consciousness, of his condition in infancy, when 
he was used to be lapped by his mother, or his nurse, in just such 
sheets as he there found, into which he was now but creeping back 
11 



146 ELIA. 

as into his proper incunabula, and resting-place. — By no other 
than by this sentiment of a pre-existent state (as I may call it), 
can I explain a deed so venturous, and, indeed, upon any other 
system, so indecorous, in this tender, but unseasonable sleeper. 

My pleasant friend Jem White was so impressed with a belief 
of metamorphoses like this frequently taking place, that in some 
sort to reverse the wrongs of fortune in these poor changelings, 
he instituted an annual feast of chimney-sweepers, at which it 
was his pleasure to officiate as host and waiter. It was a solemn 
supper held in Smithfield, upon the yearly return of the fair of St. 
Bartholomew. Cards were issued a week before to the master- 
sweeps in and about the metropolis, confining the invitation to their 
younger fry. Now and then an elderly stripling would get in 
among us, and be good-naturedly winked at ; but our main body 
were infantry. One unfortunate wight, indeed, who, relying upon 
his dusky suit, had intruded himself into our party, but by tokens 
was providentially discovered in time to be no chimney-sweeper 
(all is not soot which looks so), was quoited out of the presence 
with universal indignation, as not having on the wedding garment ; 
but in general the greatest harmony prevailed. The place chosen 
was a convenient spot among the pens, at the north side of the 
fair, not so far distant as to be impervious to the agreeable hubbub 
of that vanity ; but remote enough not to be obvious to the inter- 
ruption of every gaping spectator in it. The guests assembled 
about seven. Tn those little temporary parlors three tables were 
spread with napery, not so fine as substantial, and at every board 
a comely hostess presided with her pan of hissing sausages. The 
nostrils of the young rogues dilated at the savor. James White, 
as head waiter, had charge of the first table ; and myself, with 
our trusty companion Bigod, ordinarily ministered to the other 
two. There was clambering and jostling, you may be sure, who 
should get at the first table — for Rochester in his maddest days 
could not have done the humors of the scene with more spirit than 
my friend. After some general expression of thanks for the 
honor the company had done him, his inaugural ceremony was to 
clasp the greasy waist of old dame Ursula (the fattest of the three), 
that stood frying and fretting, half- blessing, half-cursing " the 
gentleman," and imprint upon her chaste lips a tender salute, 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEF-SWEEPERS 147 

whereat the universal host would set up a shout that tore the con- 
cave, while hundreds of grinning teeth startled the night with 
their brightness. O it was a pleasure to see the sable younkers 
lick in the unctuous meat, with his more unctuous sayings — how 
he would fit the tit-bits to the puny mouths, reserving the lengthier 
links for the seniors — how he would intercept a morsel even in 
the jaws of some young desperado, declaring it " must to the pan 
again to be browned, for it was not fit for a gentleman's eating " — 
how he would recommend this slice of white bread, or that piece 
of kissing-crust, to a tender juvenile, advising them all to have a 
care of cracking their teeth, which were their best patrimony, — 
how genteelly he would deal about the small ale, as if it were 
wine, naming the brewer, and protesting if it were not good he 
should lose their custom ; with a special recommendation to wipe 
the lip before drinking. Then we had our toasts — " The King," 
— "the Cloth," — which, whether they understood or not, was 
equally diverting and flattering ; — and for a crowning sentiment, 
which never failed, " May the Brush supersede the Laurel !" All 
these, and fifty other fancies, which were rather felt than compre- 
hended by his guests, would he utter, standing upon tables, and 
prefacing every sentiment with a " Gentlemen, give me leave to 
propose so and so," which was a prodigious comfort to those young 
orphans ; every now and then stuffing into his mouth (for it did 
not do to be squeamish on these occasions) indiscriminate pieces 
of those reeking sausages, which pleased them mightily, and was 
the savoriest part, you may believe, of the entertainment. 

Golden lads and lasses must, 

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust — 

James White is extinct, and with him these suppers have long 
ceased. He carried away with him half the fun of the world 
when he died — of my world at least. His old clients look for 
him among the pens ; and, missing him, reproach the altered 
feast of St. Bartholomew, and the glory of Smithfield departed 
for ever. 



148 ELIA 



A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS 

IN THE METROPOLIS. 



The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation — your only- 
modern Alcides 5 club to rid the time of its abuses — is uplift with 
many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the 
bugbear Mendicity from the metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags 
— staves, dogs, and crutches — the whole mendicant fraternity with 
all their baggage, are fast posting out of the purlieus of this 
eleventh persecution. From the crowded crossing, from the 
corners of streets and turnings of alleys, the parting Genius of 
Beggary is " with sighing sent. 55 

I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this imperti- 
nent crusado, or helium ad exterminationem, proclaimed against a 
species. Much good might be sucked from these Beggars. 

They were the oldest and the honorablest form of pauperism. 
Their appeals were to our common nature ; less revolting to an 
ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to the particular humors 
or caprice of any fellow-creature, or set of fellow-creatures, paro- 
chial or societarian. Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in 
the levy, ungrudged in the assessment. 

There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their 
desolation ; as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a 
man, than to go in livery. 

The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses ; and when 
Dionysius from king turned schoolmaster, do we feel anything 
towards him but contempt ? Could Vandyke have made a picture 
of him, swaying a ferula for a sceptre, which would have affected 
our minds with the same heroic pity, the same compassionate 



A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. 149 

admiration, with which we regard his Belisarius begging for an 
oholum? Would the moral have been more graceful, more 
pathetic ? 

The Blind Beggar in the legend — the father of pretty Bessy — 
whose story doggrel rhymes and ale-house signs cannot so degrade 
or attenuate, but that some sparks of a lustrous spirit will shine 
through the disguisements — this noble Earl of Cornwall (as indeed 
he was) and memorable sport of fortune, fleeing from the unjust 
sentence of his liege lord, stript of all, and seated on the flowering 
green of Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter by 
his side, illumining his rags and his beggary — would the child 
and parent have cut a better figure, doing the honors of a counter, 
or expiating their fallen condition upon the three-foot eminence 
of some sempstering shop-board ? 

In tale or history your Beggar is ever the just antipode to your 
King. The poets and romancical writers (as dear Margaret New- 
castle would call them), when they would most sharply and feel- 
ingly paint a reverse of fortune, never stop till they have brought 
down their hero in good earnest to rags and the wallet. The 
depth of the descent illustrates the height he falls from. There 
is no medium which can be presented to the imagination without 
offence. There is no breaking the fall. Lear, thrown from his 
palace, must divest him of his garments, till he answer " mere 
nature ;" and Cresseid, fallen from a prince's love, must extend 
her pale arms, pale with other whiteness than of beauty, suppli- 
eating lazar alms with bell and clap-dish. 

The Lucian wits knew this very well ; and, with a converse 
policy, when they would express scorn of greatness without the 
pity, they show us an Alexander in the shades cobbling shoes, or 
a Semiramis getting up foul linen. 

How would it sound in song, that a great monarch had declined 
his affections upon the daughter of a baker ! yet do we feel the 
imagination at all violated when we read the "true ballad," 
where King Cophetua woos the beggar maid ? 

Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are expressions of pity, but pity 
alloyed with contempt. No one properly contemns a beggar. 
Poverty is a comparative thing, and each degree of it is mocked 
by its " neighbor grice." Its poor rents and comings-in are soon 



150 ELIA. 

summed up and told. Its pretences to property are almost ludi- 
crous. Its pitiful attempts to save excite a smile. Every scorn- 
ful companion can weigh his trifle-bigger purse against it. Poor 
man reproaches poor man in the streets with impolitic mention 
of his condition, his own being a shade better, while the rich 
pass by and jeer at both. No rascally comparative insults a 
Beggar, or thinks of weighing purses with him. He is not in the 
scale of comparison. He is not under the measure of property. 
He confessedly hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No 
one twitteth him with ostentation above his means. No one 
accuses him of pride, or upbraideth him with mock humility. 
None jostle with him for the wall, or pick quarrels for precedency. 
No wealthy neighbor seeketh to eject him from his tenement. No 
man sues him. No man goes to law with him. If I were not the 
independent gentleman that I am, rather than I would be a retainer 
to the great, a led captain, or a poor relation, I would choose, out 
of the delicacy and true greatness of my mind, to be a Beggar. 

Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the Beggar's robes, 
and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, 
the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public. He is 
never out of the fashion, or limpeth awkwardly behind it. He is 
not required to put on court mourning. He weareth all colors, 
fearing none. His costume hath undergone less change than the 
Quaker's. He is the only man in the universe who is not obliged 
to study appearances. The ups and downs of the world concern 
him no longer. He alone continueth in one stay. The price of 
stock or land affecteth him not. The fluctuations of agricultural 
or commercial prosperity touch him not, or at worst but change 
his customers. He is not expected to become bail or surety for 
any one. No man troubleth him with questioning his religion or 
politics. He is the only free man in the universe. 

The Mendicants of this great city were so many of her sights, 
her lions. I can no more spare them than I could the Cries of 
London. No corner of a street is complete without them. They 
are as indispensable as the Ballad Singer; and in their pic- 
turesque attire as ornamental as the signs of old London. They 
were the standing morals, emblems, mementos, dial-mottos, the 



A COMPLAINT 0^ THE DECAY OF BEGGARS 151 

spital sermons, the books for children, the salutary checks and 
pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry — 

Look 



Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there. 

Above all, those old blind Tobits that used to line the wall of Lin- 
coln's-Inn Garden, before modern fastidiousness had expelled 
them, casting up their ruined orbs to catch a ray of pity, and (if 
possible) of light, with their faithful Dog Guide at their feet, — 
whither are they fled ? or into what corners blind as themselves, 
have they been driven, out of the wholesome air and sun- warmth ? 
immersed between four walls, in what withering poor-house do 
they endure the penalty of double-darkness, where the chink of 
the dropt half- penny no more consoles their forlorn bereavement, 
far from the sound of the cheerful and hope-stirring tread of the 
passenger ? Where hang their useless staves ? and who will 

farm their dogs ? Have the overseers of St. L caused them 

to be shot ? or were they tied up in sacks, and dropped into the 

Thames, at the suggestion of B , the mild rector of ? 

Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vincent Bourne, most clas- 
sical, and at the same time, most English of the Latinists ! — who 
has treated of this human and quadrupedal alliance, this dog and 
man friendship, in the sweetest of his poems, the Epitaphium in 
Canem, or, Dog's Epitaph. Reader, peruse it ; and say, if cus- 
tomary sights, which could call up such gentle poetry as this, 
were of a nature to do more harm or good to the moral sense of 
the passengers through the daily thoroughfares of a vast and busy 
metropolis. 

Pauperis hie Iri requiesco Lyciscus, herilis, 

Dum vixi, tutela vigil columenque senectae, 

Dux caeco fidus : nee, me ducente, solebat, 

Praetenso hinc atque hinc baculo, per iniqua locorum 

Incertam explorare viam ; sed fila secutus, 

Quae dubios regerent passus, vestigia tuta 

Fixit inoffenso gressu ; gelidumque sedile 

In nudo nactus saxo, qua praetereuntium 

Unda frequens confluxit, ibi miserisque tenebras 

Lamentis, noctemque oculis ploravit obortam. 

Ploravit nee frustra ; obolum dedit alter et alter, 



152 ELIA 

Queis corda et mentem indiderat natura benignam. 

Ad latus interea jacui sopitus herile, 

Vel mediis vigil in somnis ; ad herilia jussa 

Auresque atque animum arrectus, seu frustula amice 

Porrexit sociasque dapes, seu longa diei 

Taedia perpessus, reditum sub nocte parabat. 

Hi mores, haec vita fuit, dum fata sinebant, 
Dum neque languebam morbis, nee inerte senecta ; 
Quae tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite caecum 
Orbavit dominum : prisci sed gratia facti 
Ne tota intereat, longos delecta per annos, - 
Exiguum hunc Irus tumulum de cespite fecit, 
Etsi inopis, non ingratae, munuscula dextrae ; 
Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque canemque 
Quod memoret, fidumque canem dominumque benignum 

Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie, 

That wont to tend my old blind master's steps, 

His guide and guard : nor, while my service lasted, 

Had he occasion for that staff, with which 

He now goes picking out his path in fear 

Over the highways and crossings ; but would plant 

Safe in the conduct of my friendly string, 

A firm foot forward still, till he had reach'd 

His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide 

Of passers by in thickest confluence flow'd : 

To whom with loud and passionate laments 

From morn to eve his dark estate he wail'd. 

Nor wail'd to all in vain : some here and there, 

The well-disposed and good, their pennies gave. 

I meantime at his feet obsequious slept ; 

Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and ear 

Prick'd up at his least motion ; to receive 

At his kind hand my customary crumbs, 

And common portion in his feast of scraps ; 

Or when night warn'd us homeward, tired and spent 

With our long day and tedious beggary. 

These were my manners, this my way of life, 
Till age and slow disease me overtook, 
And sever'd from my sightless master's side. 
But lest the grace of so good deeds should die, 
Through tract of years in mute oblivion lost, 
This slender tomb of turf hath Irus reared, 
Cheap monument of no ungrudging hand, 
And with short verse inscribed it, to attest, 
In long and lasting union to attest, 
The virtues of the Beggar and his Dog. 



A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. 153 

These dim eyes have in vain explored for some months past a 
well-known figure, or part of the figure of a man, who used to 
glide his comely upper half over the pavements of London, wheel- 
ing along with most ingenious celerity upon a machine of wood ; 
a spectacle to natives, to foreigners, and to children. He was of 
a robust make, with a florid sailor-like complexion, and his head 
was bare to the storm and sunshine. He was a natural curiosity, 
a speculation to the scientific, a prodigy to the simple. The in- 
fant would stare at the mighty man brought down to his own level. 
The common cripple would despise his own pusillanimity, view- 
ing the hale stoutness, and hearty heart, of this half-limbed giant. 
Few but must have noticed him ; for the accident, which brought 
him low, took place during the riots of 1780, and he has been a 
groundling so long. He seemed earth-born, an Antaeus, and to 
suck in fresh vigor from the soil which he neighbored. He was a 
grand fragment ; as good as an Elgin marble. The nature, which 
should have recruited his reft legs and thighs, was not lost, bu 
only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. 
I heard a tremendous voice thundering and growling, as before 
an earthquake, and casting down my eyes, it was this mandrake 
reviling a steed that had started at his portentous appearance. He 
seemed to want but his just stature to have rent the ofFendino- 
quadruped in shivers. He was as the man-part of a centaur, 
from which the horse-half had been cloven in some dire Lapithan 
controversy. He moved on, as if he could have made shift with 
yet half of the body-portion which was left him. The os sublime 
was not wanting ; and he threw out yet a jolly countenance upon 
the heavens. Forty-and-two years had he driven this out-of-door 
trade, and now that his hair is grizzled in the service, but his good 
spirits no way impaired, because he is not content to exchange 
his free air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house, he is 
expiating his contumacy in one of those houses (ironically chris- 
tened) of Correction. 

Was a daily spectacle like this to be deemed a nuisance, which 
called for legal interference to remove ? or not rather a salutary 
and a touching object, to the passers-by in a great city ? Among 
her shows, her museums, and supplies for ever-gaping curiosity 
(and what else but an accumulation of sights — endless sights— 



154 ELI A. 

is a great city ; or for what else is it desirable ?) was there not 
room for one Lusus (not Naturce, indeed, but) Accidentium? 
What if in forty-and-two years' going about, the man had scraped 
together enough to give a portion to his child (as the rumor ran), 
of a few hundreds — whom had he injured ? — whom had he im- 
posed upon ? The contributors had enjoyed their sight for their 
pennies. What if after being exposed all day to the heats, the 
rains, and the frosts of heaven — shuffling his ungainly trunk 
along in an elaborate and painful motion — he was Enabled to retire 
at night to enjoy himself at a club of his fellow cripples over a 
dish of hot meat and vegetables, as the charge was gravely 
brought against him by a clergyman deposing before a House of 
Commons' Committee — was this, or was his truly paternal consi- 
deration, which (if a fact) deserved a statue rather than a whip- 
ping-post, and is inconsistent at least with the exaggeration of 
nocturnal orgies which he has been slandered with — a reason that 
he should be deprived of his chosen, harmless, nay edifying, way 
of life, and be committed in hoary age for a sturdy vagabond ? — 

There was a Yorick once, whom it would not have shamed to 
have sate down at the cripples' feast, and to have thrown in his 
benediction, ay, and his mite too, for a companionable symbol. 
" Age, thou hast lost thy breed." — 

Half of these stories about the prodigious fortunes made by 
begging are (I verily believe) misers' calumnies. One was much 
talked of in the public papers some time since, and the usual 
charitable inferences induced. A clerk in the Bank was sur- 
prised with the announcement of a five-hundred-pound legacy 
left him by a person whose name he was a stranger to. It seems 
that in his daily morning walks from Peckham (or some village 
thereabouts) where he lived, to his office, it had been his practice 
for the last twenty years to drop his halfpenny duly into the hat 
of some blind Bartimeus, that sate begging alms by the way-side 
in the Borough. The good old beggar recognized his daily bene- 
factor by the voice only ; and, when he died, left all the amassings 
of his alms (that had been half a century perhaps in the accumu- 
lating) to his old Bank friend. Was this a story to purse up 
people's hearts, and pennies, against giving an alms to the blind ? — 



A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. 155 

or not rather a beautiful moral of well-directed charity on the 
one part, and noble gratitude upon the other ? 

I sometimes wish I had been that Bank clerk. 

I seem to remember a poor old grateful kind of creature, blink- 
ing, and looking up with his no eyes in the sun — 

Is it possible I could have steeled my purse against him ? 

Perhaps I had no small change. 

Reader, do not be frightened at the hard words, imposition, im- 
posture — give, and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon the 
waters. Some have unawares (like this Bank clerk) entertained 
angels. 

Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. 
Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and 
visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether 
the " seven small children," in whose name he implores thy as- 
sistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels 
of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe 
him. If he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under a per- 
sonate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast 
relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come with their coun- 
terfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them players. You pay 
your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, concern- 
ing these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether th»;v 
are feigned or not. 



150 ELI A. 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 



Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was 
obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy 
thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the 
living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This 
period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the 
second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a 
kind of golden age by the term of Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' 
Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roast- 
ing, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother) was 
accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swine- 
herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his 
manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the 
care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond 
of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let 
some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quick- 
ly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, 
till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry 
antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it) what was 
of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no 
less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been es- 
teemed a luxury all over the East, from the remotest periods that 
we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may 
think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his father 
and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and 
the labor of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. 
While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and 
wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those un- 
timely sufferers, an odor assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 157 

which he had before experienced. What could it proceed from ? 
— not from the burnt cottage — he had smelt that smell before — 
indeed this was by no means the first accident of the kind which 
had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young fire- 
brand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, 
or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed 
his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped 
down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He 
burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby 
fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin 
had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life 
(in the world's life indeed, for before him no man had known it) 
he tasted — crackling ! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It 
did not burn him so much now, still he licked his fingers from a 
sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understand- 
ing, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so 
delicious ; and surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, 
he fell to tearing up whole hand fulls of the scorched skin with the 
flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly 
fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed 
with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to 
rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail- 
stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been 
flies. The tickling pleasure, which he experienced in his lower 
regions, had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he 
might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, 
but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an 
end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, 
something like the following dialogue ensued. 

" You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring ? 
Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three houses with 
your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you ! but you must be eating 
fire, and I know not what — what have you got there I say ?" 

" O father, the pig, the pig ! do come and taste how nice the 
burnt pig eats." 

The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and 
he cursed himself that ever ne should beget a son that should eat 
burnt pig. 



158 ELI A. 

Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, 
soon raked out another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust 
the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting 
out, "Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste — O Lord !" 
— with such-like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while 
as if he would choke. 

Ho-ti trembled in every joint while he grasped the abominable 
thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an 
unnatural young monster, when the crackling scorching his fingers, 
as it had done his son's, and applying the same remedy to them, 
he in his turn tasted some of its flavor, which, make what sour 
mouths he would for a pretence, proved not altogether displeasing 
to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious) 
both father and son fairly sat dow r n to the mess, and never left off 
till they had despatched all that remained of the litter. 

Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the 
neighbors would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abo- 
minable wretches, who could think of improving upon the good 
meat which God had sent them. Nevertheless, strange stories 
get about. It was observed that Ho-ti's cottage was burnt down 
now more frequently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time 
forward. Some would break out in broad day, others in the 
night-time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house 
of Ho-ti to be in a blaze ; and Ho-ti himself, which was the more . 
remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow more 
indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched, the 
terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take 
their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evi- 
dence was given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and 
verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury 
begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood ac- 
cused, might be handed into the box. He handled it, and they 
all handled it ; and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father 
had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them the 
same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest 
charge which judge had ever given, — to the surprise of the whole 
court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all present — without 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 159 

leaving the box, or any manner of consultation whatever, they 
brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty. 

The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest 
iniquity of the decision : and when the court was dismissed, went 
privily, and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or 
money. In a few days his Lordship's town-house was observed 
to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing 
to be seen but fire in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enor- 
mously dear all over the district. The insurance-offices one and 
all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, 
until it was feared that the very science of architecture would in 
no long time be lost to the world. Thus this custom of firing 
houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a 
sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that the flesh 
of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, 
as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a whole 
house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. 
Roasting by the string or spit came in a century or two later, I 
forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the 
manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious 
arts, make their way among mankind 

Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, 
it must be agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an 
experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these days) 
could be assigned in favor of any culinary object, that pretext 
and excuse might be found in roast pig. 

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will main- 
tain it to be the most delicate — princeps oibsoniorum. 

I speak not of your grown porkers — things between pig and 
p 0r k — those hobbydehoys — but a young and tender suckling — 
under a moon old — guiltless as yet of the sty — with no original 
speck of the amor immunditice, the hereditary failing of the first 
parent, yet manifest — his voice as yet not broken, but something 
between a childish treble and a grumble — the mild forerunner, 
or prcdudium of a grunt. 

He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate 
them seethed, or boiled — but what a sacrifice of the exterior 
tegument ! 



160 ELIA. 

There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the 
crisp, tawny, well- watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is 
well called — the very teeth are invited to their share of the plea- 
sure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance— 
with the adhesive oleaginous — O call it not fat ! but an indefin- 
able sweetness growing up to it — the tender blossoming of fat — 
fat cropped in the bud — taken in the shoot — in the first innocence 
— the cream and quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure food 

the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna — or, rather, 

fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each 
other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or com- 
mon substance. 

Behold him, while he is " doing" — it seemeth rather a refresh- 
ing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How 
equably he twirleth round the string ! — Now he is just done. To 
see the extreme sensibility of that tender age ! he hath wept out 
his pretty eyes — radiant jellies — shooting stars. — 

See him in the dish his second cradle, how meek he lieth ! — 
wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and 
indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood ? Ten 
to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, 
disagreeable animal — wallowing in all manner of filthy conversa- 
tion — from these sins he is happily snatched away — 

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade 
Death came with timely care — 

his memory is odoriferous — no clown curseth, while his stomach 
half rejecteth, the rank bacon — no coalheaver bolteth him in 
reeking sausages — he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stom- 
ach of the judicious epicure — and for such a tomb might be con- 
tent to die. 

He is the best of sapors. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed 
almost too transcendant — a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to 
sinning that really a tender-conscienced person would do well to 
pause — too ravishing for mortal taste, she wound eth and ex- 
coriateth the lips that approach her — like lovers' kisses, she biteth 
— she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and in- 
sanity of her relish — but she stoppeth at the palate — she med- 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 161 

dleth not with the appetite — and the coarsest hunger might 
barter her consistently for a mutton chop. 

Pig — let me speak his praise — is no less provocative of the 
appetite, than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious 
palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling 
refuseth not his mild juices. 

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and 
vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without 
hazard, he is good throughout. No part of him is better or 
w 7 orse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little means ex- 
tend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is 
all neighbors' fare. 

I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share 
of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine 
are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest 
in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as 
in mine own. "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." 
Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those 
" tame villatic fowl "), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, 
I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as 
it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put 
somewhere. One would not, like Lear, " give everything." I 
make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the 
Giver of all good flavors, to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the 
house, slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or I know not 
what), a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, 
to my individual palate — It argues an insensibility. 

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My 
good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday 
without stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, 
had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, fresh 
from the oven. In my way to school (it was over London bridge) 
a grey-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt, at this 
time of day, that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to con- 
sole him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very cox- 
combry of charity, schoolboy-like, I made him a present of — the 
whole cake ! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such 
12 



162 EL1A 

occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satisfaction ; but before 
I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, 
and I burst into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my 
good aunt, to go and give her good gift away to a stranger that I 
had never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I 
knew ; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be 
taking in thinking that I — I myself, and not another — would eat 
her nice cake — and what should I say to her the next time I saw 
her — how naughty I was to part with her pretty present ! — and 
the odor of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and 
the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, 
and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed 
she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at 
last — and I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and 
out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness ; and above all I wished never 
to see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey 
impostor. 

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing those 
tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something 
of a shock, as we hear of any obsolete custom. The age of dis- 
cipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philo- 
sophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards 
intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and 
dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. 
Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, 
how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a 
gusto. — 

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, 
when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning 
and pleasantry on both sides, " Whether, supposing that tiie fla- 
vor of a pig who obtained his death by whipping ( per flagella- 
tionem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man 
more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the 
animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the ani- • 
mal to death ?■" I forget the decision. 

His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread 
crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. loJ 

sage. But banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole 
onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep 
them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and 
guilty garlic ; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger 
than they are — but consider, he is a weakling — a flower. 



J 64 ELI A. 



A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT 



THE BEHAVIOR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. 



As a single man, I have spent a good deal of my time in noting 
down the infirmities of Married People, to console myself for 
those superior pleasures, which they tell me I have lost by re- 
maining as I am. 

I cannot say that the quarrels of men and their wives ever 
made any great impression upon me, or had much tendency to 
strengthen me in those anti-social resolutions, which I took up 
long ago upon more substantial considerations. What oftenest 
offends me at the houses of married persons where I visit, is an 
error of quite a different description ; it is that they are too 
loving. 

Not too loving neither : that does not explain my meaning. 
Besides, why should that offend me ? The very act of separating 
themselves from the rest of the world, to have the fuller enjoy- 
ment of each other's society, implies that they prefer one another 
to all the world. 

But what I complain of is, that they carry this preference so 
undisguisedly, they perk it up in the faces of us single people so 
shamelessly, you cannot be in their company a moment without 
being made to feel, by some indirect hint or open avowal, that you 
are not the object of this preference. Now there are some things 
which give no offence, while implied or taken for granted merely ; 
but expressed, there is much offence in them. If a man were to 
accost the first homely- featured or plain-dressed young woman of 



A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT. 165 

his acquaintance, and tell her bluntly, that she was not handsome 
or rich enough for him, and he could not marry her, he would 
deserve to be kicked for his ill manners ; yet no less is implied 
in the fact, that having access and opportunity of putting the 
question to her, he has never yet thought fit to do it. The young 
woman understands this as clearly as if it were put into words ; 
but no reasonable young woman would think of making this the 
ground of a quarrel. Just as little right have a married couple 
to tell me by speeches, and looks that are scarce less plain than 
speeches, that I am not the happy man — the lady's choice. It is 
enough that I know that I am not : I do not want this perpetual 
reminding. 

The display of superior knowledge or riches may be made suf- 
ficiently mortifying ; but these admit of a palliative. The know- 
ledge which is brought out to insult me, may accidentally improve 
me ; and in the rich man's houses and pictures, his parks and 
gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at least. But the display 
of married happiness has none of these palliatives ; it is through- 
out pure, unrecompensed, unqualified insult. 

Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the least 
invidious sort. It is the cunning of most possessors of any exclu- 
sive privilege to keep their advantage as much out of sight as 
possible, that their less favored neighbors, seeing little of the bene- 
fit, may be less disposed to question the right. But these mar- 
ried monopolists thrust the most obnoxious part of their patent 
into our faces. 

Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency 
and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-mar- 
ried couple — in that of the lady particularly ; it tells you, that 
her lot is disposed of in this world : that you can have no hopes 
of her. It is true, I have none ; nor wishes either, perhaps ; but 
this is one of those truths which ought, as I said before, to be 
taken for granted, not expressed. 

The excessive airs which those people give themselves, founded 
on the ignorance of us unmarried people, would be more offen- 
sive if they were less irrational. We will allow them to under- 
stand the mysteries belonging to their own craft better than we, 
who have not had the happiness to be made free of the company : 



166 ELIA. 

but their arrogance is not content within these limits. If a single 
person presume to offer his opinion in their presence, though upon 
the most indifferent subject, he is immediately silenced as an in- 
competent person. Nay, a young married lady of my acquaint- 
ance, who, the best of the jest was, had not changed her condi- 
tion above a fortnight before, in a question on which I had the 
misfortune to differ from her, respecting the properest mode of 
breeding oysters for the London market, had the assurance to ask 
with a sneer, how such an old Bachelor as I could pretend to 
know anything about such matters ! 

But what I have spoken of hitherto is nothing to the airs which 
these creatures give themselves when they come, as they gene- 
rally do, to have children. When I consider how little of a rarity 
children are — that every street and blind alley swarms with 
them — that the poorest people commonly have them in most abun- 
dance — that there are few marriages that are not blest with at 
least one of these bargains — how often they turn out ill, and de- 
feat the fond hope of their parents, taking to vicious courses, 
which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, &c, I cannot for 
my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having 
them. If they were young phoenixes, indeed, that were born 
but one in a year, there might be a pretext. But when they are 
so common 

I do not advert to the insolent merit which they assume with 
their husbands on these occasions. Let them look to that. But 
why we, who are not their natural-born subjects, should be ex- 
pected to bring our spices, myrrh, and incense — our tribute and 
homage of admiration — I do not see. 

" Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are the 
young children :" so says the excellent office in our Prayer-book 
appointed for the churching of women. " Happy is the man that 
hath his quiver full of them :" So say I ; but then don't let him 
discharge his quiver upon us that are weaponless ; let them be 
arrows, but not to gall and stick us. I have generally observed 
that these arrows are double-headed : they have two forks, to be 
sure to hit with one or the other. As for instance, where you 
come into a house which is full of children, if you happen to 
take no notice of them (you are thinking of something else, per- 



A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT. 167 

haps, and turn a deaf ear to their innocent caresses), you are set 
down as untractable, morose, a hater of children. On the other 
hand, if you find them more than usually engaging — if you are 
taken with their pretty manners, and set about in earnest to romp 
and play with them, some pretext or other is sure to be found for 
sending them out of the room ; they are too noisy or boisterous, 

or Mr. does not like children. With one or other of these 

forks the arrow is sure to hit you. 

I could forgive their jealousy, and dispense with toying with 
their brats, if it gives them any pain ; but I think it unreasonable 
to be called upon to love them, where I see no occasion — to love 
a whole family, perhaps eight, nine, or ten indiscriminately — to 
love all the pretty dears, because children are so engaging ! 

I know there is a proverb, " Love me, love my dog :" that is 
not always so very practicable, particularly if the dog be set upon 
you to tease you or snap at you in sport. But a dog, or a lesser 
thing — any inanimate substance, as a keepsake, a watch or a ring, 
a tree, or the place where we last parted when my friend went 
away upon a long absence, I can make shift to love, because I 
love him, and anything that reminds me of him, provided it be in 
its nature indifferent, and apt to receive whatever hue fancy can 
give it. But children have a real character, and an essential be- 
ing of themselves : they are amiable or unamiable per se ; I 
must love or hate them, as I see cause for either in their quali- 
ties. A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being 
regarded as a mere appendage to another being, and to be loved 
or hated accordingly : they stand with me upon their own stock, 
as much as men and women do. Oh ! but you will say, sure it 
is an attractive age — there is something in the tender years of 
infancy that of itself charms us ? That is the very reason why 
I am more nice about them. I know that a sweet child is the 
sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate crea- 
tures which bear them ; but the prettier the kind of a thing is, 
the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One 
daisy differs not much from another in glory ; but a violet should 
look and smell the daintiest. I was always rather squeamish in 
my women and children. 

But this is not the worst : one must be admitted into their fami- 



168 ELIA. 

liarity at least, before they can complain of inattention. It implies 
visits, and some kind of intercourse. But if the husband be a man 
with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage 
— if you did not come in on the wife's side — if you did not sneak 
into the house in her train, but were an old friend in fast habits 
of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thoughi on, — 
look about you — your tenure is precarious — before a twelvemonth 
shall roll over your head, you shall find your old friend gradually 
grow cool and altered towards you, and at last seek opportunities 
of breaking with you. I have scarce a married friend of my ac- 
quaintance, upon whose firm faith I can rely, whose friendship 
did not commence after the period of his marriage. With some 
limitations, they can endure that ; but that the good man should 
have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship in which 
they were not consulted, though it happened before they knew 
him, — before they that are now man and wife ever met, — this is 
intolerable to them. Every long friendship, every old authentic 
intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped 
with their currency, as a sovereign prince calls in the good old 
money that was coined in some reign before he was born or 
thought of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his 
authority, before he will let it pass current in the world. You 
may guess what luck generally befalls such a rusty piece of 
metal as I am in these new mintings. 

Innumerable are the ways which they take to insult and worm 
you out of their husbands' confidence. Laughing at all you say 
with a kind of wonder, as if you were a queer kind of fellow that 
said good things, but an oddity, is one of the ways ; — they have a 
particular kind of stare for the purpose ; — till at last the husband, 
who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over some 
excrescences of understanding and manner for the sake of a gene- 
ral vein of observation (not quite vulgar) which he perceived in 
you, begins to suspect whether you are not altogether a humorist 
— a fellow well enough to have consorted with in his bachelor 
days, but not quite so proper to be introduced to ladies. This 
may be called the staring way ; and is that which has oftenest 
been put in practice against me. 

Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony ; that 



A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT. 169 

is, where they find you an object of especial regard with their 
husband, who is not so easily to be shaken from the lasting attach- 
ment founded on esteem which he has conceived towards you, by 
never qualified exaggerations to cry up all that you say or do, till 
the good man, who understands well enough that it is all done in 
compliment to him, grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is 
due to so much candor, and by relaxing a little on his part, and 
taking down a peg or two in his enthusiasm, sinks at length to the 
kindly level of moderate esteem — that " decent affection and com- 
placent kindness " towards you, where she herself can join in 
sympathy with him without much stress and violence to her 
sincerity. 

Another way (for the ways they have to accomplish so desira- 
ble a purpose are infinite) is, with a kind of innocent simplicity, 
continually to mistake what it was which first made their husband 
fond of you. If an esteem for something excellent in your moral 
character was that which riveted the chain which she is to break, 
upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your 
conversation, she will cry, "I thought, my dear, you described 

your friend, Mr. , as a great wit V If, on the other hand, 

it was for some supposed charm in your conversation that he first 
grew to like you, and was content for this to overlook some trifling 
irregularities in your moral deportment, upon the first notice of 
any of these she as readily exclaims, " This, my dear, is your 
good Mr. !" One good lady whom I took the liberty of ex- 
postulating with for not showing me quite so much respect as 1 
thought due to her husband's old friend, had the candor to confess 
to me that she had often heard Mr. speak of me before mar- 
riage, and that she had conceived a great desire to be acquainted 
with me, but that the sight of me had very much disappointed her 
expectations ; for from her husband's representations of me, she 
had formed a notion that she was to see a fine, tall officer-like- 
looking man (I use her very words), the very reverse of which 
proved to be the truth. This was candid ; and I had the civility 
not to ask her in return, how she came to pitch upon a standard 
of personal accomplishments for her husband's friends which dif- 
fered so much from his own ; for my friend's dimensions as near 
as possible approximate to mine; he standing five feet five in his 



170 ELI A. 

shoes, in which I have the advantage of him by about half an 
inch ; and he no more than myself exhibiting any indications of a 
martial character in his air or countenance. 

These are some of the mortifications which I have encountered 
in the absurd attempt to visit at their houses. To enumerate them 
all would be a vain endeavor ; I shall therefore just glance at the 
very common impropriety of which married ladies are guilty, — 
of treating us as if we were their husbands, and vice versa. I 
mean, when they use us with familiarity, and their husbands with 
ceremony. Testacea, for instance, kept me the other night two 
or three hours beyond my usual time of supping, while she was 

fretting because Mr. did not come home, till the oysters 

were all spoiled, rather than she would be guilty of the impolite- 
ness of touching one in his absence. This was reversing the 
point of good manners ; for ceremony is an invention to take off 
the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be 
less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than 
some other person is. It endeavors to make up, by superior at- 
tentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is 
forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea kept the oysters 
back for me, and withstood her husband's importunities to go to 
supper, she would have acted according to the strict rules of pro- 
priety. I know no ceremony that ladies are bound to observe to 
their husbands, beyond the point of a modest behavior and deco- 
rum : therefore I must protest against the vicarious gluttony of 
Cerasia, who at her own table sent away a dish of Morellas, which 
I was applying to with great good-will, to her husband at the 
other end of the table, and recommended a plate of less extraordi- 
nary gooseberries to my un wedded palate in their stead. Neither 
can I excuse the wanton affront of 

But I am weary of stringing up all my married acquaintance 
by Roman denominations. Let them amend and change their 
manners, or I promise to record the full-length English of their 
names, to the terror of all such desperate offenders in future. 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 171 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 



The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other 
day — I know not by what chance it was preserved so long — 
tempts me to call to mind a few of the Players, who make the 
principal figure in it. It presents the cast of parts of the Twelfth 
Night, at the old Drury-lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago. 
There is something very touching in these old remembrances. 
They make us think how we once used to read a Play Bill — not, 
as now peradventure, singling out a favorite performer, and cast- 
ing a negligent eye over the rest ; but spelling out every name, 
down to the very mutes and servants of the scene ; — when it was 
a matter of no small moment to us whether Whitfield, or Packer, 
took the part of Fabian ; when Benson, and Burton, and Philli- 
more — names of small account — had an importance, beyond what 
we can be content to attribute now to the time's best actors. — 
" Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore." — What a full Shakspearian sound 
it carries ! how fresh to memory arise the image, and the manner, 
of the gentle actor ! 

Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or 
fifteen years, can have no adequate notion of her performance 
of such parts as Ophelia ; Helena, in All's Well that Ends Well ; 
and Viola in this play. Her voice had latterly acquired a coarse- 
ness, which suited well enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but 
in those days it sank, with her steady melting eye, into the heart. 
Her joyous parts — in which her memory now chiefly lives — in 
her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. There is no giv- 
ing an account how she delivered the disguised story of her love 
for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to 
weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following 



172 ELI A. 

line, to make up the music — yet I have heard it so spoken, or 
rather read, not without its grace and beauty — but, when she had 
declared her sister's history to be a " blank," and that she " never 
told her love," there was a pause, as if the story had ended — and 
then the image of the " worm in the bud," came up as a new 
suggestion — and the heightened image of " Patience" still followed 
after that, as by some growing (and not mechanical) process, 
thought springs up after thought, I would almost say, as they 
were watered by her tears. So in those fine lines — 

4ft 

Write loyal cantos of contemned love — 
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills — 

there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that 
which was to follow. She used no rhetoric in her passion ; or it 
was nature's own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it seemed 
altogether without rule or law. 

Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the pride of her beauty, 
made an admirable Olivia. She was particularly excellent in her 
unbending scenes in conversation with the Clown. I have "seen 
some Olivias — and those very sensible actresses too — who in these 
interlocutions have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and to 
vie conceits with him in downright emulation. But she used 
him for her sport, like what he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or 
two with, and then to be dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady 
still. She touched the imperious fantastic humor of the charac- 
ter with nicety. Her fine spacious person filled the scene. 

The part of Malvolio has, in my judgment, been so often mis- 
understood, and the general merits of the actor, who then played 
it, so unduly appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon, if I am a 
little prolix upon these points. 

Of all the actors who flourished in my time — a melancholy 
phrase if taken aright, reader — Bensley had most of the swell of 
soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emo- 
tions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the 
fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm — the rarest faculty 
among players. None that I remember possessed even a portion 
of that fine madness which he threw out in Hotspur's famous rant 
about glory, or the transports of the Venetian incendiary at the 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 173 

vision of the fired city. His voice had the dissonance, and at times 
the inspiriting effect, of the trumpet. His gait was uncouth and 
stiff, but no way embarrassed by affectation ; and the through-bred 
gentleman was uppermost in every movement. He seized the 
moment of passion with greatest truth ; like a faithful clock, never 
striking before the time ; never anticipating or leading you to 
anticipate. He was totally destitute of trick and artifice. He 
seemed come upon the stage to do the poet's message simply, and 
he did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver 
the errands of the gods. He let the passion or the sentiment do 
its own work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned 
to mountebank it ; and betrayed none of that cleverness which is 
the bane of serious acting. For this reason, his Iago was the 
only endurable one I remember to have seen. No spectator from 
his action could divine more of his artifice than Othello was 
supposed to do. His confessions in soliloquy alone put you in 
possession of the mystery. There were no by- intimations to 
make the audience fancy their own discernment so much greater 
than that of the Moor — who commonly stands like a great helpless 
mark set up for mine Ancient, and a quantity of barren specta- 
tors, to shoot their bolts at. The Iago of Bensley did not go to 
work so grossly. There was a triumphant tone about the char- 
acter, natural to a general consciousness of power ; but none of 
that petty vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon 
any little successful stroke of its knavery-— as is common with 
your small villains, and green probationers in mischief. It did 
not clap or crow before its time. It was not a man setting his 
wits at a child, and winking all the while at other children who 
are mightily pleased at being let into the secret ; but a consum- 
mate villain entrapping a noble nature into toils, against which 
no discernment was available, where the manner was as fathom- 
less as the purpose seemed dark, and without motive. The part 
of Malvolio, in the Twelfth Night, was performed by Bensley, 
with a richness and a dignity, of which (to judge from some re- 
cent castings of that character) the very tradition must be worn 
out from the stage. No manager in those days would have 
dreamed of giving it to Mr. Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons : when 
Bensley was occasionally absent from the theatre, John Kemble 



174 ELIA. 

thought it no derogation to succeed to the part. Malvolio is not 
essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by accident. He 
is cold, austere, repelling ; but dignified, consistent, and, for what 
appears, rather of an over-stretched morality. Maria describes 
him as a sort of Puritan ; and he might have worn his gold chain 
with honor in one of our old round-head families, in the service 
of a Lambert, or a Lady Fairfax. But his morality and his 
manners are misplaced in Illyria. He is opposed to the proper 
levities of the piece, and falls in the unequal contest. Still his 
pride, or his gravity (call it which you will), is inherent, and 
native to the man, not mock or affected, which latter only are the 
fit objects to excite laughter. His quality is at the best unlovely, 
but neither buffoon nor contemptible. His bearing is lofty, a lit- 
tle above his station, but probably not much above his deserts. 
We see no reason why he should not have been brave, honorable, 
accomplished. His careless committal of the ring to the ground 
(which he was commissioned to restore to Cesario), bespeaks a 
generosity of birth and feeling. His dialect on all occasions is that 
of a gentleman, and a man of education. We must not confound 
him with the eternal old low steward of comedy. He is master 
of the household to a great princess ; a dignity probably conferred 
upon him for other respects than age or length of service. Olivia, 
at the first indication of his supposed madness, declares that she 
" would not have him miscarry for half of her dowry." Does 
this look as if the character was meant to appear little or insigni- 
ficant ! Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face — of what ? — 
of being " sick of self-love," — but with a gentleness and consider- 
ateness which could not have been, if she had not thought that 
this particular infirmity shaded some virtues. His rebuke to the 
knight, and his sottish revellers, is sensible and spirited ; and 
when we take into consideration the unprotected condition of his 
mistress, and the strict regard with which her state of real or dis- 
sembled mourning would draw the eyes of the world upon her 
house-affairs, Malvolio might feel the honor of the family in some 
sort in his keeping ; as it appears not that Olivia had any more 
brothers, or kinsmen, to look to it — for Sir Toby had dropped all 
such nice respects at the buttery-hatch. That Malvolio was 
meant to be represented as possessing estimable qualities, the ex. 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 175 

pression of the Duke, in his anxiety to have him reconciled, 
almost infers : " Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace." Even 
in his abused state of chains and darkness, a sort of greatness 
seems never to desert him. He argues highly and well with the 
supposed Sir Topas, and philosophizes gallantly upon his straw.* 
There must have been some shadow of worth about the man ; he 
must have been something more than a mere vapor — a thing of 
straw, or Jack in office — before Fabian and Maria could have 
ventured sending him upon a courting-errand to Olivia. There 
was some consonancy (as he would say) in the undertaking, or 
the jest would have been too bold even for that house of misrule. 
Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish 
loftiness. He looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian. 
He was starch, spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of pride 
seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth. There was something 
in it beyond the coxcomb. It was big and swelling, but you could 
not be sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see it taken 
down, but you felt that it was upon an elevation. He was mag- 
nificent from the outset ; but when the decent sobrieties of the 
character began to give way, and the poison of self-love, in his 
conceit of the Countess's affection, gradually to work, you would 
have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person stood before 
you. How he went smiling to himself! with what ineffable care- 
lessness would he twirl his gold chain ! what a dream it was ! 
you were infected with the illusion, and did not wish that it should 
be removed ! you had no room for laughter ! if an unseasonable 
reflection of morality intruded itself, it was a deep sense of the 
pitiable infirmity of man's nature, that can lay him open to such 
frenzies— but in truth you rather admired than pitied the lunacy 
while it lasted. You felt that an hour of such mistake was worth 
an age with the eyes open. Who would not wish to live but for 
a day in the conceit of such a lady's love as Olivia ? Why, the 
Duke would have given his principality but for a quarter of a 
minute, sleeping or waking, to have been so deluded. The man 

* Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl ? 
Mai. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. 
Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion ? 
Mai. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion. 



176 ELIA. 

seemed to tread upon air, to taste manna, to walk with his head in 
the clouds, to mate Hyperion. O ! shake not the castles of his 
pride — endure yet for a season, bright moments of confidence — 
" stand still, ye watches of the element," that Malvolio may be 
still in fancy fair Olivia's lord ! — but fate and retribution say no 
— I hear the mischievous titter of Maria — the witty taunts of Sir 
Toby — the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight 
— the counterfeit Sir Topas is unmasked and " thus the whirli- 
gig of time," as the true clown hath it, "brings in his revenges." 
I confess that I never saw the catastrophe of this character, while 
Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic interest. There was 
good foolery too. Few now remember Dodd. What an Ague- 
cheek the stage lost in him ! Lovegrove, who came nearest to 
the old actors, revived the character some few seasons ago, and 
made it sufficiently grotesque ; but Dodd was it, as it came out of 
nature's hands. It might be said to remain in puris naturalibus. 
In expressing slowness of apprehension, this actor surpassed all 
others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing slowly 
over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with a pain- 
ful process, till it cleared up at last to the fullness of a twilight 
conception — its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his 
intellect, as some have had the. 'power to retard their pulsation. 
The balloon takes less time ^n filling, than it took to cover the 
expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with ex- 
pression. A glimmer of understanding would appear in a cor- 
ner of his eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his 
forehead would catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in 
communicating it to the remainder. 

I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five-and- 
twenty years ago, that walking in the gardens of Gray's Inn — 
they were then far finer than they are now — the accursed Veru- 
lam Buildings had not encroached on all the east side of them, 
vcutting out delicate green crankles, and shouldering away one of 
two of the stately alcoves of the terrace — the survivor stands gap- 
ing and relationless as if it remembered its brother — they are still 
the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved Tem- 
ple not forgotten — have the gravest character, their aspect being 
altogether reverent and lawbreathing — Bacon has left the impress 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 177 

of his foot upon their gravel walks — taking my afternoon solace 
on a summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a comely sad per- 
sonage came toward me, whom, from his grave air and deportment, 
I judged to be one of the old Benchers of the Inn. He had a se- 
rious thoughtful forehead, and seemed to be in meditations of mor- 
tality. As I have an instinctive awe of old Benchers, I was pass- 
ing him with that sort of subindicative token of respect which one 
is apt to demonstrate towards a venerable stranger, and which 
rather denotes an inclination to greet him, than any positive mo- 
tion of the body to that effect — a species of humility and will- 
worship which I observe, nine times out of ten, rather puzzles 
than pleases the person it is offered to — when the face turning 
full upon me, strangely identified itself with that of Dodd. Upon 
close inspection I was not mistaken. But could this sad thought- 
ful countenance be the same vacant face of folly which I had 
hailed so often under circumstances of gaiety ; which I had never 
seen without a smile, or recognized but as the usher of mirth ; 
that looked out so formally flat in Foppington, so frothily pert in 
Tattle, so impotently busy in Backbite ; so blankly divested of all 
meaning, or resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, 
and a thousand agreeable impertinences ? Was this the face — 
full of thought and carefulness — that had so often divested itself 
at will of every trace of either to give me diversion, to clear my 
cloudy face for two or three hours at least of its furrows ? Was 
this the face — manly, sober, intelligent — which I had so often 
despised, made mocks at, made merry with ? The remembrance 
of the freedoms which I had taken with it came upon me with a 
reproach of insult. I could have asked it pardon. I thought it 
looked upon me with a sense of injury. There is something 
strange as well as sad in seeing actors — your pleasant fellows par- 
ticularly — subjected to and suffering the common lot ; — their for- 
tunes, their casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene, 
their actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. We can 
hardly connect them with more awful responsibilities. The death 
of this fine actor took place shortly after this meeting. He had 
quitted the stage some months ; and, as I learned afterwards, had 
been in the habit of resorting daily to these gardens almost to the 
day of his decease. In these serious walks probably he was di- 
13 



17S ELJA 

vesting himself of many scenic and some real vanities — weaning 
himself from the frivolities of the lesser and the greater theatre — 
doing gentle penance for a life of no very reprehensible fooleries 
— taking off by degrees the buffoon mask which he might feel he 
had worn too long — and rehearsing for a more solemn cast of part. 
Dying, he " put on the weeds of Dominic."* 

If few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily 
forget the pleasant creature, who in those days enacted the part 
of the Clown to Dodd's Sir Andrew. Richard, or rather Dicky 
Suett — for so in his life-time he delighted to be called, and time 
hath ratified the appellation — lieth buried on the north side of the 
cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender 
years were dedicated. There are who do yet remember him 
at that period — his pipe clear and harmonious. He would often 
speak of his chorister days, when he was " cherub Dicky." 

What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should 
exchange the holy for the profane state ; whether he had lost his 
good voice (his best recommendation to that office), like Sir John, 
" with hallooing and singing of anthems ;" or whether he was 
adjudged to lack something, even in those early years, of the 
gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to " com- 
merce with the skies " — I could never rightly learn ; but we find 
him, after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a 
secular condition, and become one of us. 

I think he was not altogether of that timber out of which cathe- 
dral seats and sounding-boards are hewed. But if a glad heart 
— kind, and therefore glad — be any part of sanctity, then might 
the robe of Motley, with which he invested himself with so much 
humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so 

* Dodd was a man of reading, and had left at his death a choice collection 
of old English literature. I should judge him to have been a man of wit 
I knew one instance of an impromptu which no length of study could have 
bettered. My merry friend, Jem White, had seen him one evening in 
Aguecheek, and recognizing Dodd the next day in Fleet street, was irre- 
sistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him as the identical Knight 
of the preceding evening with a " Save you, Sir AndrewJk Dodd, not at 
all disconcerted at this unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous 
half-rebuking waive of the hand, put him off with an " Away, Fool n 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 179 

much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be ac- 
cepted for a surplice — his white stole, and albe. 

The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon 
the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I 
have been told, with adopting the name of Parsons in old men's 
characters. At the period in which most of us knew him, he was 
no more an imitator than he was in any true sense himself insta- 
ble. 

He was the Robin Goodfellow of the stage. He came in to 
trouble all things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit 
troubled for the matter. He was known, like Puck, by his note 
— Ha f Ha ! Ha ! — sometimes deepening to Ho ! Ho I Ho ! 
with an irresistible accession, derived, perhaps, remotely from his 
ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype of, — O La! 
Thousands of hearts yet respond to the chuckling O La I of 
Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by the faithful 
transcript of his friend Mathews' mimicry. The " force of nature 
could no further go." He drolled upon the stock of these two 
syllables richer than the cuckoo. 

Care, that troubled all the world, was forgotten in his compo- 
sition. Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he 
could never have supported himself upon those two spider's 
strings, which served him (in the latter part of his unmixed ex- 
istence) as legs. A doubt or scruple must have made him totter, 
a sigh have puffed him down ; the weight of a frown had stag- 
gered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he 
went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with Robin Good- 
fellow, " thorough brake, thorough briar/' reckless of a scratched 
face or a torn doublet. 

Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. 
They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, 
a slippery tongue, this last the ready midwife to a without-pain- 
delivered jest ; in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the 
centre ; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing 
with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery hatch. 

Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal 
favorites with the town than any actors before or after. The dif- 
ference, I take it, was this : — Jack was more beloved for his sweet, 



ISO ELTA. 

good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky was more liked for his 
sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole con- 
science stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the 
Children in the Wood — but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shak- 
speare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He 
put us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before him — not as from 
Jack, as from an antagonist, — but because it could not touch him, 
any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the 
burthen of that death ; and, when Death came himself, not in 
metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, 
who kindly watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, 
neither varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, with the 
simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph 
—OLaf O.La! Bobby! 

The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity) commonly 
played Sir Toby in those days ; but there is a solidity of wit in 
the jests of that half-FalstafF which he did not quite fill out. He 
was as much too showy as Moody (who sometimes took the part) 
w r as dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there was an air of 
swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. He was a gentleman 
with a slight infusion of the footman. His brother Bob (of recenter 
memory), who was his shadow in everything while he lived, and 
dwindled into less than a shadow afterwards — was a gentleman 
with a little stronger infusion of the latter ingredient ; that was all. 
It is amazing how a little of the more or less makes a difference 
in these things. When you saw Bobby in the Duke's Servant,* 
you said, " What a pity such a pretty fellow was only a servant !" 
When you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought 
you could trace his promotion to some lady of quality who fan- 
cied the handsome fellow in his topknot, and had bought him a 
commission. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable. 

Jack had two voices, both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuat- 
ing ; but his secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively 
histrionic than his common one. It was reserved for the specta- 
tor ; and the dramatis personse were supposed to know nothing at 
all about it. The lies of young Wilding, and the sentiments in 

*High Life Below Stairs 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 181 

Joseph Surface, were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the 
audience. This secret correspondence with the company before 
the curtain (which is the bane and death of tragedy) has an ex- 
tremely happy effect in some kinds of comedy, in the more highly 
artificial comedy of Congreve or of Sheridan especially, where the 
absolute sense of reality (so indispensable to scenes of interest) is 
not required, or would rather interfere to diminish your pleasure. 
The fact is, you do not believe in such characters as Surface — 
the villain of artificial comedy — even while you read or see them. 
If you did, they would shock and not divert you. When Ben, ^n 
Love for Love, returns from sea, the following exquisite dialogue 
occurs at his first meeting with his father : — 

Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw 
thee. 

Ben. Ey, ey, been ! Been far enough, and that be all. — Well, father, 
and how do all at home ? how does brother Dick, and brother Vail ? 

Sir Sampson. Dick ! body o' me, Dick has been dead these two years. 
I writ you word when you were at Leghorn. 

Ben. Mess, that's true ; Marry, I had forgot. Dick's dead, as you say 
— Well, and how ? — I have a many questions to ask you — 

Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be 
revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the 
warm-hearted temperament of the character. But when you read it 
in the spirit with which such playful selections and specious com- 
binations rather than strict metaphrase? of nature should be taken, 
or when you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does, wound 
the moral sense at all. For what is Ben — the pleasant sailor 
which Bannister gives us — but a piece of satire — a creation of 
Congreve J s fancy — a dreamy combination of all the accidents of 
a sailor's character — his contempt of money — his credulity to 
women — with that necessary estrangement from home which is 
just within the verge of credibility to suppose might produce such 
an hallucination as is here described. We never think the worse 
of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his cnaracter. But when 
an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom — the crea- 
ture dear to half-belief — which Bannister exhibited — displays be- 
fore our eyes a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor — a 
jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar— and nothing else — when instead 



182 ELIA. 

of investing it with a delicious confusedness of the head, and a 
veering undirected goodness of purpose — -he gives to it a down- 
right daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its ac- 
tions ; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a 
pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by 
them alone — we feel the discord of the thing ; the scene is dis- 
turbed ; a real man has got in among the dramatis personae, and 
puts them out. We want the sailor turned out. We feel that 
his true place is not behind the curtain, but in the first or second 
gallery. 



THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 183 



ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 



The artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on 
our stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in 
seven years only, to be exploded and put down instantly. The 
times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occa- 
sional licence of dialogue ? I think not altogether. The business 
of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We 
screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, 
the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as 
the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or v/ard in real life 
should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle 
emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine 
playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after con- 
sequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their 
bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue 
(not reducible in life to the point of strict morality), and take it 
all for truth. We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and 
judge him accordingly. We try him in our courts, from which 
there is no appeal to the dramatis persona, his peers. We have 
been spoiled with — not sentimental comedy — but a tyrant far more 
pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclu- 
sive and all-devouring drama of common life ; where the moral 
point is everything ; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed 
personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy), we recog- 
nize ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, 
enemies, — the same as in life,— with an interest in what is going 
on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral 
judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or 
slumber for a moment. What is there transacting, by no modifi- 



184 ELIA. 

cation is made to affect us in any other manner than the same 
events or characters would do in our relationships of life. We 
carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go 
thither, like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, 
so much as to confirm our experience of it ; to make assurance 
double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives 
twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend 
twice to the shades. All that neutral ground of character, which 
stood between vice and virtue ; or which in fact was indifferent 
to neither, where neither properly was called in question ; that 
happy breathing-place from the burden of a perpetual moral ques- 
tioning — the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry — is 
broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of 
society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. 
We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark 
like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic 
representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our 
anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in 
a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and sun- 
shine. 

I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer 
for) I am glad for a season to*take an airing beyond the diocese 
of the strict conscience, — not to live always in the precincts of the 
law-courts, — but now and then, for a dream- while or so, to imagine 
a world with no meddling restrictions — to get into recesses, 
whither the hunter cannot follow me — 



• Secret shades 



Of woody Ida's inmost grove, 
While yet there was no fear of Jove. 

I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more 
healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having 
respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how 
it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one 
of Congreve's — nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's — 
comedies. I am the gayer at least for it ; and I could never 
connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result 
to be drawn from them to imitation in reaA life. They are a 



THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 185 

world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land. Take one of 
Jheir characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are 
alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation 
shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos 
of the pit could desire ; because in a modern play I am to judge of 
the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of 
'political justice. The atmosphere will blight it, it cannot live here. 
It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from 
which it must needs fall headlong ; as dizzy, and incapable of 
making a stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered 
unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. 
But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad ? — 
The Fainalls and the Mirables, the Dorimants and the Lady 
Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense ; 
in fact they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in 
their proper element. They break through no laws, or conscien- 
tious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of 
Christendom into the land — what shall I call it ? — of cuckoldry — 
the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners 
perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, 
which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No good 
person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person 
suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these 
plays — the few exceptions only are mistakes — is alike essentially 
vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially 
shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes, — 
some little generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps excepted, 
— not only anything like a faultless character, but any pretensions 
to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this 
designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy, as the design (if 
design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which 
his Way of the World in particular possesses of interesting you 
all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely 
care nothing — for you neither hate nor love his personages — and 
I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure 
the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call 
it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his 
creations ; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or 



186 ELIA. 

preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush 
of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and 
actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to 
the discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we 
think them none. 

Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend 
Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets, — the business 
of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. 
No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recog- 
nized ; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this 
frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translat- 
ing them. No such effects are produced in their world. When 
we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not 
to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are 
insulted by their proceedings — for they have none among them. 
No peace of families is violated — for no family ties exist among 
them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained — for none is 
supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted, no 
holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder — for affection's depth 
and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is 
neither right nor wrong, — gratitude or its opposite, — claim or duty, 
— paternity or sonship. Of what consequence is it to Virtue, or 
how is she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon, or Dap- 
perwit, steal away Miss Martha ; or who is the father of Lord 
Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant's children ? 

The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as uncon- 
cerned at the issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs 
and mice. But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the 
puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare not contemplate 
an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical moral sense 
is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage 
to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor 
punishment. We cling to the painful necessities of shame and 
blame. We would indict our very dreams. 

Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing 
old, it is something to have seen the School for Scandal in its 
glory. This comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, but 
gathered some alloys of the sentimental comedy which followed 



THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 187 

theirs. It is impossible that it should be now acted, though it con- 
tinues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its hero, 
when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I 
remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the 
measured step, the insinuating voice — to express it in a word — 
the downright acted villainy of the part, so different from the 
pressure of conscious actual wickedness, — the hypocritical assump- 
tion of hypocrisy, — which made Jack so deservedly a favorite in 
that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of 
playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely 
confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother ; 
that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are passages, 
— like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a 
pittance to a poor relation, — incongruities which Sheridan was 
forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the senti- 
mental comedy, either of which must destroy the other — but over 
these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a 
refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance 
of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure ; you got over the 
paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the 
regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly 
artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every 
disagreeable impression which you might have received from the 
contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You 
did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you 
believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former 
a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is 
incongruous ; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompati- 
bilities : the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant ; but it required 
the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements. 
A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not 
dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively 
avoid every turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to make 
the character fascinating. He must take his cue from his spec- 
tators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly 
opposed to each other as the death-beds of those geniuses are con- 
trasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared 
from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. 



188 ELIA. 

Paul's Church-yard memory — (an exhibition as venerable as the 
adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at 
the hour of death ; where the ghastly apprehensions of the for- 
mer, — and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting- 
fork is not to be despised, — so finely contrast with the meek com- 
placent kissing of the rod, — taking it in like honey and butter,. — 
with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, 
Time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a 
popular young ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, 
would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate 
mower ? — John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. 
He was playing to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir 
Peter and his lady. You had the first intimation of a sentiment 
before it was on his lips. His altered voice was meant to you, and 
you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage 
perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to you if that half 
reality, the husband, was overreached by the puppetry — or the 
thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was persuaded it was dying 
of a plethory ? The fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not 
concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage in good 
time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The plea- 
sant old Teazle King, too, is gone in good time. His manner 
would scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or 
hate — acquit or condemn — censure or pity — exert our detestable 
coxcombry of moral judgment upon everything. Joseph Surface, 
to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain — no compro- 
mise — his first appearance must shock and give horror — his specious 
plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers wel- 
comed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dra- 
matic harm even) could come, or was meant to come, of them, 
must inspire a cold and killing aversion. Charles (the real cant- 
ing person of the scene — for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulte- 
rior legitimate ends, but his brother's professions of a good heart 
centre in downright self-satisfaction) must be loved and Joseph 
hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir 
Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old 
bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were 
evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to con- 



THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 189 

cern anybody on the stage — -he must be a real person, capable in 
law of sustaining an injury — -a person towards whom duties are 
to be acknowledged — the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the vil- 
lainous seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under 
his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life 
— must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just 
„ as the same predicament would move you in a neighbor or old 
friend. The delicious scenes which give the play its name and 
zest, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you heard 
the reputation of a dear female friend attacked in your real pre- 
sence. Crabtree and Sir Benjamin — those poor snakes that live 
but in the sunshine of your mirth — must be ripened by this hot- 
bed process of realization into asps or amphisbsenas ; and Mrs. 
Candor — O ! frightful ! — become a hooded serpent. Oh ! who 
that remembers Parsons and Dodd — the wasp and butterfly of the 
School for Scandal — in those two characters ; and charming natu- 
ral Miss Pope, the perfect gentlewoman as distinguished from the 
fine lady of comedy, in this latter part- — would forego the true 
scenic delight — the escape from life — the oblivion of consequences 
— the holiday barring out of the pedant Reflection — those Satur- 
nalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world — to sit 
instead at one of our modern plays — to have his coward conscience 
(that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with per- 
petual appeals — dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without 
repose must be — and his moral vanity pampered with images of 
notional justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the 
spectators' risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author 
nothing ? 

No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts 
as this manager's comedy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. 
Abington in Lady Teazle ; and Smith, the original Charles, had 
retired when I first saw it. The rest of the characters, with very 
slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then the fashion 
to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after 
Smith ; but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more 
airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. He 
brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He had 
not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty de- 



190 - ELI A. 

clamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. 
His failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so 
opposite a tendency. But as far as I could judge, the weighty 
sense of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he 
had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped, 
and dulcified in good-humor. He made his defects a grace. His 
exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to 
convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed 
to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling 
sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered each 
in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them 
could be altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant 
dialogue — the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley — because 
none understood it — half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, 
in Love for Love, was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged 
sometimes in the intervals of tragic passion. He would slumber 
over the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has 
been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particu- 
larly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities 
of tragedy have not been touched by any since him — the playful 
court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in 
Hamlet — the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades 
of Richard — disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, 
his torpors — but they were the halting-stones and resting-place 
of his tragedy — politic savings, and fetches of the breath — hus- 
bandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist 
— rather, I think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at 
worst, less painful than the eternal tormenting unappeasable vigi- 
lance, — the " lidless dragon eyes," of present fashionable tragedy. 



ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN 191 



ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. 



Not many nights ago, I had come home from seeing this extra- 
ordinary performer in Cockletop ; and when I retired to my pil- 
low, his whimsical image still stuck by me, in a manner as to 
threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of it, by conjur- 
ing up the most opposite associations. I resolved to be serious. 
I raised up the gravest topics of life ; private misery, public ca- 
lamity. All would not do : 

There the antic sate 

Mocking our state 

his queer visnomy — his bewildering costume — all the strange 
things which he had raked together — his serpentine rod, s wagging 
about in his pocket — Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics — 
O'Keefe's wild farce, and his wilder commentary — till the pas- 
sion of laughter, like grief in excess, relieved itself by its own 
weight, inviting the sleep which in the first instance it had driven 
away. 

But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into 
slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed 
me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, 
were dancing before me, like the faces which, whether you will 
or no, come when you have been taking opium — all the strange 
combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot 
his proper countenance into, from the day he came commissioned 
to dry up the tears of the town for the loss of the now almost for- 
gotten Edwin. for the power of the pencil to have fixed them 
when I awoke ! A season or two since, there was exhibited a 



192 ELIA. 

Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a Mun- 
den gallery. In richness and variety, the latter would not fall 
far short of the former. 

There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but 
what a one it is !) of Liston ; but Munden has none that you can 
properly pin down, and call his. When you think he has ex- 
hausted his battery of looks, in unaccountable warfare with your 
gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of features, 
like Hydra. He is not one, but legion ; not so much a comedian, 
as a company. If his name could be multiplied like his coun- 
tenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone, literally 
makes faces : applied to any other person, the phrase is a mere 
figure, denoting certain modifications of the human countenance. 
Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend 
Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should 
not be surprised to see him some day put out the head of a 
river-horse ; or come forth a pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered 
metamorphosis. 

I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry — in Old 
Dornton — diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse 
of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man ; when he has 
come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a 
people. I have seen some faint approaches to this sort of ex- 
cellence in other players. But in the grand grotesque of farce, 
Munden stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. 
Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers. The school of Mun- 
den began, and must end, with himself. 

Can any man wonder, like him ? can any man see ghosts, like 
him ? or fight with his own shadow — " sessa" — as he does in that 
strangely-neglected thing, the Cobbler of Preston — where his 
alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the 
Magnifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as 
wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted be- 
fore him. Who like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, 
a preternatural interest over the commonest daily-life objects ? 
A table or a joint-stool, in his conception, rises into a dignity 
equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It is invested with constellatory 
importance. You could not speak of it with more deference, if 



ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. 193 

it were mounted into tne firmament. A beggar in the hands of 
Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So 
the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. 
His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething- 
pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, 
' contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He under- 
stands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, 
amid the common-place materials of life, like primeval man with 
the sun and stars about him. 

BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 



I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will 
over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. 
The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than 
envy : and contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy 
in succession to have been its inhabitants, w r eave for us illusions, 
incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities 
of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I 
think, attends us between entering an empty and a crowded 
church. In the latter it is chance but some present human frailty 
— an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory — or 
a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory on that of the preacher 
- — puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing the place and the 
occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness ? — go 
alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master 
Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church : think of 
the piety that has kneeled there — the congregations, old and 
young, that have found consolation there — the meek pastor — the 
docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross con- 
flicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till 
thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies 
that kneel and weep around thee. 

Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few 
miles out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great 
14 



194 ELIA. 

house with which I had been impressed in this way in infancy. 
I was apprised that the owner of it had lately pulled it down ; 
still I had a vague notion that it could not all have perished, that 
so much solidity with magnificence could not have been crushed 
all at once into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it. 

The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, 
and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to — an anti- 
quity. 

I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where 
had stood the great gates ? What bounded the court-yard ? 
Whereabout did the out-houses commence ? A few bricks only 
lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so spa- 
cious. 

Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The 
burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion. 

Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of 
destruction, at the plucking of every panel I should have felt the 
varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a 
plank at least out of the cheerful store-room, in whose hot window- 
seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plot before, and 
the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted 
it about me — it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns ; 
or a panel of the yellow room. 

Why, every plank and panel in that house for me had magic 
in it. The tapestried bed-rooms — tapestry so much better than 
painting — not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots — at 
which childhood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its 
coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a 
momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright visages, staring 
reciprocally — all Ovid on the walls, in colors vivider than his 
descriptions. Actseon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable pru- 
dery of Diana ; and the still more provoking, and almost culinary 
coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of 
Marsyas. 

Then, that haunted room — in which old Mrs. Battle died — 
whereinto I have crept, but always in the day time, with a pas- 
sion of fear ; and a sneaking curiosity, terror- tain ted, to hold 
communication with the past. How shall they build it up again ? 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 195 

It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that 
traces of the splendor of past inmates were everywhere apparent. 
Its furniture was still standing — even to the tarnished gilt leather 
battledoors, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, 
which told that children had once played there. But I was a 
lonely child, and had the range at will of every apartment, 
knew every nook and corner, wondered and worshipped every- 
where. 

The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, 
as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration. So strange 
a passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though 
there lay — I shame to say how few roods distant from the man- 
sion — half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such 
was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my careful- 
ness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters 
lay unexplored for me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevail- 
ing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty 
brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. 
Variegated views, extensive prospects — and those at no great 
distance from the house — I was told of such — what were they to 
me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden ? So far from a 
wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the 
fences of my chosen prison ; and have been hemmed in by a yet 
securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. I could have 
exclaimed with that garden-loving poet — 

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines ; 
Curl me about, ye gadding vines ; 
And oh so close your circles lace, 
That I may never leave this place ; 
But, lest your fetters prove too weak, 
Ere I your silken bondage break, 
Do you, brambles, chain me too, 
And courteous briars, nail me through. 

I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug fire-sides — the low- 
built roof — parlors ten feet by ten — frugal boards, and all the home- 
liness of home — these were the condition of my birth — the whole- 
some soil which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to 
their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of 



196 ELIA. 

something beyond ; and to have taken, if but a peep, in child- 
hood, at the contrasting accidents of a great fortune. 

To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have 
been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper 
terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors ; 
and the coatless antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving 
the long line of a Mowbray's or De Clifford's pedigree, at those 
sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as these 
who do inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and 
what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea ? Is it trenchant 
to their swords ? can it be hacked off as a spur can ? or torn 
away like a tarnished garter ? 

What else were the families of the great to us ? what pleasure 
should we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory 
brass monuments ? What to us the uninterrupted current of 
their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a cognate 
and correspondent elevation ? 

Or wherefore else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon that 
hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, Blakes- 
mook. ! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon the mystic 
characters — thy emblematic supporters, with their prophetic 
" Resurgam " — till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I re- 
ceived into myself Very Gentility 1 Thou wert first in my 
morning eyes ; and of nights hast detained my steps from bed- 
ward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on 
thee. 

This is the only true gentry by adoption ; the veritable change 
of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion. 

Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, 1 
know not, I inquired not ; but its fading rags, and colors cobweb- 
stained, told that its subject was of two centuries back. 

And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas — 
feeding flocks — not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln — did I in 
less earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once 
proud Mgon ? repaying by a backward triumph the insults he 
might possibly have heaped in his life-time upon my poor pastoral 
progenitor. 

If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 197 

the mansion had least reason to complain. They had long for- 
saken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle ; and I was 
left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise 
my fancy, or soothe my vanity. 

I was the true descendant of those old W s ; and not the 

present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places. 

Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I 
have gone over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one 
and then another — would seem to smile, reaching forward from 
the canvas, to recognize the new relationship ; while the rest 
looked grave, as it seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling, and 
thoughts of fled posterity. 

That Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb 
— that hung next the great bay window — with the bright yel- 
low H shire hair, and eye of watchet hue — so like my 

Alice ! — I am persuaded she was a true Elia — Mildred Elia, I 
take it. 

Mine too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall with its 
mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars — stately busts in 
marble — ranged round ; of whose countenances, young reader 
of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, 
had most of my wonder ; but the mild Galba had my love. 
There they stood in the coldness of death, yet freshness of immor- 
tality. 

Mine too thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority, 
high-backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, 
or self- forgetful maiden — so common since, that bats have roosted 
in it. 

Mine too — whose else ? — thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun- 
baked southern wall ; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising back- 
wards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of 
palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the ele- 
ments, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glit- 
tering ; the verdant quarters backwarder still ; and stretching 
still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of 
the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood-pigeon, with 
that antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not; 
but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship 



198 ELIA. 

to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that frag- 
mental mystery. 

Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently 
in your idol-worship, walks and windings of Blakesmoor ! 
for this, or what sin of mine has the plough passed over youi 
pleasant places ? I sometimes think that as men, when they die, 
do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations \here may be a 
hope — a germ to be revivified. 



POOR RELATIONS. 190 



POOR RELATIONS. 



.4 ^oor Relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature — a piece 
of impertinent correspondency — an odious approximation — a 
haunting conscience — a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the 
noon-tide of our prosperity — an unwelcome remembrancer — a 
perpetually recurring mortification — a drain on your purse, a 
more intolerable dun upon your pride — a drawback upon success 
— a rebuke to your rising — a stain in your blood — a blot on your 
'scutcheon — a rent in your garment — a death's-head at your ban- 
quet— Agathocles' pot — a Mordecai in your gate, a Lazarus at 
your door — a lion in your path — a frog in your chamber — a fly 
in your ointment — a mote in your eye — a triumph to your enemy, 
an apology to your friends — the one thing not needful — the hail 
in harvest — the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet. 

He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you " That is 
Mr. ." A rap, between familiarity and respect ; that de- 
mands, and at the same time seems to despair of, entertainment. 
He entereth smiling and— embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand 
to you to shake, and — draweth it back again. .He casually look- 
eth in about dinner-time — when the table is full. He ofFereth to 
go away, seeing you have company — but is induced to stay. He 
filleth a chair, and your visitor's two children are accommodated 
at a side table. He never cometh upon open days, when your 

wife says with some complacency, " My dear, perhaps Mr. 

will drop in to-day." He remembereth birth- days — and profess- 
eth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth 
against fish, the turbot being small — yet he sufFereth himself to 
be importuned into a slice, against his first resolution. He sticK- 
eth by the port — yet will be prevailed upon to empty the remain- 



200 ELIA. 

der glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is a 
puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or 
not civil enough, to him. The guests think " they have seen 
him before." Every one speculateth upon his condition; and 
the most part take him to be — a tide-waiter. He calleth you by 
your Christian name, to imply that his other is the same with your 
own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less diffi- 
dence. With half the familiarity, he might pass for a casual 
dependant ; with more boldness, he would be in no danger of be- 
ing taken for what he is. He is too humble for a friend ; yet 
taketh on him more state than befits a client. He is a worse 
guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent 
— yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanor, that your guests take 
him for one. He is asked to make one at the whist table ; re- 
fuseth on the score of poverty, and — resents being left out. 
When the company break up, he profFereth to go for a coach— 
and lets the servant go. He recollects your grandfather ; and 
will thrust in some mean and quite unimportant anecdote — of the 
family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as " he 
is blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to insti- 
tute what he calleth — favorable comparisons. With a reflecting 
sort of congratulation, he will inquire the price of your furniture ; 
and insults you with a special commendation of your window- 
curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape, 
but, after all, there was something more comfortable about the 
old tea-kettle — which you must remember. He dare say you 
must find a great convenience in having a carriage of your own, 
and appealeth to your lady if it is not so. Inquireth if you have 
had your arms done on vellum yet ; and did not know, till 
lately, that such-and-such had been the crest of the family. 
His memory is unseasonable ; his compliments perverse ; his 
talk a trouble ; his stay pertinacious ; and when he goeth away, 
you dismiss his chair into a corner, as precipitately as possible, 
and feel fairly rid of two nuisances. 

There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is — a female 
Poor Relation. You may do something with the other; you 
may pass him off tolerably well ; but your indigent she-relative 
is hopeless. " He is an old humorist," you may say, " and affects 



POOR RELATIONS. 201 

to go threadbare. His circumstances are better than folks 
would take them to be. You are fond of having a Character at 
your table, and truly he is one." But in the indications of 
female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses 
below herself from caprice. The truth must out without shuf- 
fling. " She is plainly related to the L s ; or what does she 

at their house ?" She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin, 
Nine times out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is 
something between a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former 
evidently predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and 
ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be 
repressed sometimes — aliquando suffiaminandus erat — but there is 
no raising her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be 

helped — after the gentlemen. Mr. requests the honor of 

taking wine with her ; she hesitates between Port and Madeira, 
and chooses the former — because he does. She calls the servant 
Sir ; and insists on not troubling him to hold her plate. The 
housekeeper patronises her. The children's governess takes upon 
her to correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for harpsichord. 
Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of the 
disadvantages to which this chimerical notion of affinity constitut- 
ing a claim to acquaintance, may subject the spirit of a gentleman. 
A little foolish blood is all that is betwixt him and a lady with a 
great estate. His stars are perpetually crossed by the malig- 
nant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him 
" her son Dick." But she has wherewithal in the end to recom- 
pense his indignities, and float him again upon the brilliant sur- 
face, under which it had been her seeming business and pleasure 
all along to sink him. All men, besides, are not of Dick's tem- 
perament. I knew an Amlet in real life, who, wanting Dick's 

buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W was of my own standing 

at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of promise. If he had a 
blemish, it was too much pride ; but its quality was inoffensive ; 
it was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to keep 
inferiors at a distance ; it only sought to ward off derogation from 
itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried as far as it 
could go, without infringing upon that respect, which he would 
have every one else equally maintain for himself. He would 



202 ELIA. 

have you to think alike with him on this topic. Many a quarrel 
have I had with him, when we were rather older boys, and our 
tallness made us more obnoxious to observation in the blue clothes, 
because I would not thread the alleys and blind ways of the town 
with him to elude notice, when we have been out together on a 
holiday in the streets of this sneering and prying metropolis. 
W went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, where the dig- 
nity and sweetness of a scholar's life, meeting with the alloy of 
an humble introduction, wrought in him a passionate devotion to 
the place, with a profound aversion from the society. The ser- 
vitor's gown (worse than his school array) clung to him with 
Nessian venom. He thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under 
which Latimer must have walked erect, and in which Hooker, in 
his young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no discommendable 
vanity. In the depth of college shades, or in his lonely chamber, 
the poor student shrank from observation. He found shelter 
among books, which insult not ; and studies, that ask no questions 
of a youth's finances. He was lord of his library, and seldom 
cared for looking out beyond his domains. The healing influ- 
ence of studious pursuits was upon him, to soothe and to abstract. 
He was almost a healthy man — when the waywardness of his 
fate broke out against him with a second and worse malignity. 
The father of W had hitherto exercised the humble profes- 
sion of house-painter at N , near Oxford. A supposed inte- 
rest with some of the heads of colleges had now induced him to 
take up his abode in that city, with the hope of being employed 
upon some public works which were talked of. From that moment 
I read in the countenance of the young man the determination 
which at length tore him from academical pursuits for ever. To 
a person unacquainted with our universities, the distance between 
the gownsmen and the townsmen, as they are called — the trading 
part of the latter especially — is carried to an excess that would 

appear harsh and incredible. The temperament of W 's 

father was diametrically the reverse of his own. Old W 

was a little, busy, cringing tradesman, who, with his son upon his 
arm, would stand bowing and scraping, cap in hand, to anything 
that wore the semblance of a gown — insensible to the winks and 
opener remonstrances of the young man, to whose chamber-fel- 



POOR RELATIONS. 203 

low, or equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously and 
gratuitously ducking. Such a state of things could not last. 

W must change the air of Oxford, or be suffocated. He 

chose the former ; and let the sturdy moralist, who strains the 
point of the filial duties as high as they can bear, censure the 
dereliction ; he cannot estimate the struggle. I stood with 

W , the last afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of his 

paternal dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading from the High 

street to the back of * * * * college, where W kept his rooms. 

He seemed thoughtful and more reconciled. I ventured to rally 
him — finding him in a better mood — upon a representation of the 
Artist Evangelist, which the old man, whose affairs were begin- 
ning to flourish, had caused to be set up in a splendid sort of 
frame over his really handsome shop, either as a token of pros- 
perity or badge of gratitude to his saint. W looked up at 

the Luke, and, like Satan, " knew his mounted sign — and fled." 
A letter on his father's table the next morning announced that he 
had accepted a commission in a regiment about to embark for 
Portugal. He was among the first who perished before the walls 
of St. Sebastian. 

I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with treating 
half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently 
painful ; but this theme of poor relationship is replete with -»o 
much matter for tragic as well as comic associations, that it is dif- 
ficult to keep the account distinct without blending. The earliest 
impressions which I received on this matter, are certainly not at- 
tended with anything painful, or very humiliating, in the recall- 
ing. At my father's table (no very splendid one) was to be found 
every Saturday, the mysterious figure of an aged gentleman, 
clothed in neat black, of a sad yet comely appearance. His de- 
portment was of the essence of gravity ; his words few or none ; 
and I was not to make a noise in his presence. I had little incli- 
nation to have done so— -for my cue was to admire in silence. A 
particular elbow chair was appropriated to him, which was in no 
case to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which ap- 
peared on no other occasion, distinguished the days of his coming. 
I used to think him a prodigiously rich man. All I could make 
out of him was, that he and my father had been schoolfellows, a 



204 ELIA. 

world ago, at Lincoln, and that he came from the Mint. The 
Mint I knew to be a place where all the money was coined — and 
I thought he was the owner of all that money. Awful ideas of 
the Tower twined themselves about his presence. He seemed 
above human infirmities and passions. A sort of melancholy 
grandeur invested him. From some inexplicable doom I fancied 
him obliged to go about in an eternal suit of mourning ; a captive 
— a stately being, let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often have 
I wondered at the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an 
habitual general respect which we all in common manifested 
towards him, would venture now and then to stand up against him 
in some argument, touching their youthful days. The houses of 
the ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers 
know) between the dwellers on the hill and in the valley. This 
marked distinction formed an obvious division between the boys 
who lived above (however brought together in a common school) 
and the boys whose paternal residence was on the plain ; a suf- 
ficient cause of hostility in the code of these young Grotiuses. My 
father had been a leading Mountaineer ; and would still maintain 
the general superiority, in skill and hardihood, of the Above Boys 
(his own faction) over the Below Boys (so were they called), of 
which party his contemporary had been a chieftain. Many and 
hot were the skirmishes on this topic — the only one upon which 
the old gentleman was ever brought out — and bad blood bred ; 
even sometimes almost to the recommencement (so I expected) of 
actual hostilities. But my father, who scorned to insist upon ad- 
vantages, generally contrived to turn the conversation upon some 
adroit by -commendation of the old Minster ; in the general pre- 
ference of which, before all other cathedrals in the island, the 
dweller on the hill and the plain-born, could meet on a conciliating 
level, and lay down their less important differences. Once only 
I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and I remembered with 
anguish the thought that came over me : " Perhaps he will never 
come here again." He had been pressed to take another plate 
of the viand, which I have already mentioned as the indispensable 
concomitant of his visits. He had refused with a resistance 
amounting to rigor — when my aunt, an old Lincolnian, but who 
had something of this, in common with my cousin Bridget, that 



POOR RELATIONS. 205 

she would sometimes press civility out of season — uttered the fol- 
lowing memorable application — " Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, 
for you do not get pudding every day." The old gentleman said 
nothing at the time — but he took occasion in the course of the 
evening, when some argument had intervened between them, to 
utter with an emphasis which chilled the company, and which 
chills me now as I write it — " Woman, you are superannuated !" 
John Billet did not survive long, after the digesting of this affront ; 
but he survived long enough to assure me that peace was actually 
restored ! and, if I remember aright, another pudding was dis- 
creetly substituted in the place of that which had occasioned the 
offence. He died at the Mint (anno 1781), where he had long 
held, what he accounted, a comfortable independence ; and with 
five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a penny, which were found in 
his escrutoire, after his decease, left the world, blessing God that 
he had enough to bury him, and that he had never been obliged 
to any man for a sixpence. This was — a Poor Relation. 



206 ELIA. 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. 



To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced 
product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding 
may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own. 

Lord Foppingtoti, in the Relapse. 

An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck with 
this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading alto- 
gether, to the great improvement of his originality. At the hazard 
of losing some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate 
no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's thoughts. 
I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose my- 
self in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am read- 
ing ; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. 

I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, 
nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I oall a 
book. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow 
for such. 

In this catalogue of books which are no books — biblia a-biblia — 
I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket-Books, Draught 
Boards, bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, 
Almanacks, Statutes at Large : the works of Hume, Gibbon, Ro- 
bertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and generally all those volumes 
which " no gentleman's library should be without :" the Histories 
of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philo- 
sophy. With these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I 
bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding. 

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in books 9 
clothing perched upon shelves like false saints, usurpers of true 
shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING 207 

occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, 
and hope it some kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what 
" seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Es- 
say. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find — Adam Smith. 
To view a well-arranged assortment of block-headed Encyclopae- 
dias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of russia, 
or morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably 
reclothe my shivering folios ; would renovate Paracelsus himself, 
and enable old Raymund Lully to look like himself again in the 
world. I never see these impostors, but I long to strip them, to 
warm my ragged veterans in their spoils. 

To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum of a 
volume. Magnificence comes after. This, when it can be 
afforded, is not to be lavished upon all kinds of books indiscrimi- 
nately. . I would not dress a set of Magazines, for instance, in 
full suit. The dishabille, or half-binding (with russia backs ever) 
is our costume. A Shakspeare, or a Milton (unless the first 
editions), it were mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The 
possession of them confers no distinction. The exterior of them 
(the things themselves being so common), strange to say, raises no 
sweet emotions, no tickling sense of property in the owner. 
Thomson's Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn 
and dog's-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are 
the sullied leaves, and worn-out appearance, nay the very odor 
(beyond russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidious- 
ness, of an old " Circulating Library " Tom Jones, or Vicar of 
Wakefield ! How they speak of the thousand thumbs that have 
turned over their pages with delight ! — of the lone sempstress, 
whom they may have cheered (milliner, or hard-working mantua- 
maker) after her long day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, 
when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep 
her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchant- 
ing contents ! Who would have them a whit less soiled ? What 
better condition could we desire to see them in ? 

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from 
binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and all that class of perpetu- 
ally self-reproductive volumes — Great Nature's Stereotypes — we 
see them individually perish with less regret, because we know 



208 ELIA. 

the copies of them to be " eterne." But where a book is at once 
both good and rare — where the individual is almost the species, 
and when that perishes, 

We know not where is that Promethean torch 
That can its light relumine — 

such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, 
by his Duchess — no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently 
durable, to honor and keep such a jewel safe. 

Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless 
ever to be reprinted ; but old editions of writers, such as Sir 
Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton in his prose works, Fuller — 
of whom we have reprints, yet the books themselves, though they 
go about, and are talked of here and there, we know, have not 
endenizened themselves (nor possibly ever will) in the national 
heart, so as to become stock books — it is good to possess these in 
durable and costly covers. I do not care for a First Folio of 
Shakspeare. I rather prefer the common editions of Rowe and 
Tonson, without notes, and with plates, which, being so execrably 
bad, serve as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text ; and 
without pretending to any supposable emulation with it, are so 
much better than the Shakspeare gallery engravings, which did. 
I have a community of feeling with my countrymen about his 
Plays, and I like those editions of him best, which have been 
oflenest tumbled about and handled. — On the contrary, I cannot 
read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo editions 
are painful to look at. I have no sympathy with them. If they 
were as much read as the current editions of the other poet, I 
should prefer them in that shape to the older one. I do not know 
a more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melan- 
choly. What need was there of unearthing the bones of that fan- 
tastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the 
newest fashion to modern censure ? what hapless stationer could 
dream of Burton ever becoming popular ? — The wretched Malone 
could not do worse, when he bribed the sexton of Stratford church 
to let him whitewash the painted effigy of old Shakspeare, which 
stood there, in rude but lively fashion depicted, to the very color 
of the cheek, the eye, the eye-brow, hair, the very dress he used 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. 209 

to wear — the only authentic testimony we had, however imperfect, 
of these curious parts and parcels of him. They covered him 
over with a coat of white paint. By , if I had been a jus- 
tice of peace for Warwickshire, I would have clapt both com- 
mentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a pair of meddling 
sacrilegious varlets. 

I think I see them at their work — these sapient trouble-tombs. 

Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the names of 
some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the 
ear — to mine, at least — than that of Milton or of Shakspeare ? 
It may be, that the latter are more staled and rung upon in com- 
mon discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume 
in the mention, are, Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Haw- 
thornden, and Cowley. 

Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the 
five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who 
would think of taking up the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a 
volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons ? 

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played 
before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, 
who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears. 

Winter evenings — the world shut out — with less of ceremony 
the gentle Shakspeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or 
his own Winter's Tale — 

These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud — to yourself, 
or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one 
— and it degenerates into an audience. 

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the 
eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could 
never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without ex- 
treme irksomeness. 

A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank 
offices it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for one 
of the clerks — who is the best scholar — to commence upon the 
Times, or the Chronicle, and recite its entire contents aloud, pro 
lono publico. With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the 
effect is singularly vapid. In barbers' shops and public-houses 
a fellow will get up and spell out a paragraph, which he commu- 
15 



210 ELIA. 

nicates as some discovery. Another follows with his selection. 
So the entire journal transpires at length by piece-meal. Seldom- 
readers are slow readers, and, without this expedient, no one in 
the company would probably ever travel through the contents of 
a whole paper. 

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one 
down without a feeling of disappointment. 

What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's, 
keeps the paper ! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out 
incessantly, " The Chronicle is in hand, Sir." 

Coming in to an inn at night — having ordered your supper — what 
can be more delightful than to find lying in the window-seat, left 
there time out of mind by the carelessness of some former guest 
— two or three numbers of the old Town and Country Magazine, 
with its amusing tete-a-tete pictures — " The Royal Lover and 

Lady G ;" " The Melting Platonic and the old Beau,"— and 

such-like antiquated scandal ? Would you exchange it — at that 
time, and in that place — for a better book ? 

Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much 
for the weightier kinds of reading — the Paradise Lost, or Comus, 
he. could have read to him — but he missed the pleasure of skim- 
ming over with his own eye a magazine, or a light pamphlet. 

I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some 
cathedral alone, and reading Candide. 

I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been 
once detected — by a familiar damsel — reclined at my ease upon 
the grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading — Pamela. 
There was nothing in the book to make a man seriously ashamed at 
the exposure ; but as she seated herself down by me, and seemed 
determined to read in company, I could have wished it had been 
— any other book. We read on very sociably for a few pages ; 
and, not finding the author much to her taste, she got up, and — 
went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture, 
whether the blush (for there was one between us) was the pro- 
perty of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you 
shall never get the secret. 

I am not much the friend to out-of-doors reading. : I cannot 
settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. 211 

generally to be seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner's-street was 
not), between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning, study- 
ing a volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a strain of 
abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled 
along, keeping clear of secular contacts. An illiterate encounter 
with a porter's knot, or a bread-basket, would have quickly put 
to flight all the theology I am master of, and have left me worse 
than indifferent to the five points. 

There is a class of street-readers, whom I can never contem- 
plate without affection — the poor gentry, who, not having where- 
withal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open 
stalls — the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious looks at 
them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. Ven- 
turing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when 
- shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves 

the gratification, they " snatch a fearful joy." Martin B , in 

this way, by daily fragments, got through two volumes of Cla- 
rissa, when the stall-keeper damped his laudable ambition, by 
asking him (it was in his younger days) whether he meant to 
purchase the work. M. declares, that under no circumstance in 
his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which 
he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day 
has moralized upon this subject in two very touching but homely 
stanzas. 

I saw a boy with eager eye 

Open a book upon a stall, 

And read, as he'd devour it all ; 

Which when the stall-man did espy, 

Soon to the boy I heard him call, 

" You, Sir, you never buy a book, 

Therefore in one you shall not look." 

The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh 

He wish'd he never had been taught to read, 

Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need. 

Of sufferings the poor have many, 
Which never can the rich annoy : 
I soon perceived another boy, 
Who iook'd as if he had not any 
Food, for that day at least— enjoy 



212 ELI A. 

The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. 

This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder, 

Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny, 

Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat : 

No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learned to eat 



STAGE ILLUSION. 213 



STAGE ILLUSION. 



A play is said to be well or ill acted, in proportion to the scenical 
illusion produced. Whether such illusion can in any case be 
perfect, is not the question. The nearest approach to it, we are 
told, is, when the actor appears wholly unconscious of the pre- 
sence of spectators. In tragedy — in all which is to affect the 
feelings — this undivided attention to his stage business seems in- 
dispensable. Yet it is, in fact, dispensed with every day by our 
cleverest tragedians ; and while these references to an audience, 
in the shape of rant or sentiment, are not too frequent or palpa- 
ble, a sufficient quantity of illusion for the purposes of the dra- 
matic interest may be said to be produced in sjrite of them. But, 
tragedy apart, it may be inquired whether, in certain characters 
in comedy, especially those which are a little extravagant, or 
which involve some notion repugnant to the moral sense, it is not 
a proof of the highest skill in the comedian when, without abso- 
lutely appealing to an audience, he keeps up a tacit understand- 
ing with them ; and makes them, unconsciously to themselves, a 
party in the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the mode 
of doing this ; but we speak only of the great artists in the pro- 
fession. 

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in our- 
selves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice. To 
see a coward done to the life upon a stage would produce anything 
but mirth. Yet we most of us remember Jack Bannister's cow. 
ards. Could anything be more agreeable, more pleasant ? We 
loved the rogues. How was this effected but by the exquisite art 
of the actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us, the spectators, 
even in the extremity of the shaking fit, that he was not half such 



2H ELI A. 

a coward as we took him for? We saw all the common symp- 
toms of the malady upon him ; the quivering lip, the cowering 
knees, the teeth chattering ; and could have sworn " that man 
was frightened." But we forgot all the while — or kept it almost 
a secret to ourselves — that he never once lost his self-possession ; 
that he let out by a thousand droll looks and gestures — meant at 
us, and not at all supposed to be visible to his fellows in the scene JJS[ 
that his confidence in his own resources had never once deserted 
him. Was this a genuine picture of a coward ? or not rather a 
likeness, which the clever artist contrived to palm upon us in- 
stead of an original ; while we secretly connived at the delusion 
for the purpose of greater pleasure, than a more genuine coun- 
terfeiting of the imbecility, helplessness, and utter self-desertion, 
which we know to be concomitants of cowardice in real life, 
could have given us ? 

Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable on 
the stage, but because the skilful actor, by a sort of sub-refer- 
ence, rather than direct appeal to us, disarms the character of a 
great deal of its odiousness, by seeming to engage our compas- 
sion for the insecure tenure by which he holds his money-bags 
and parchments ? f By this subtle vent half of the hatefulness 
of the character — the self-closeness with which in real life it 
coils itself up from the sympathies of men — evaporates. The 
miser becomes sympathetic ; i. e. is no genuine miser. Here 
again a diverting likeness is substituted for a very disagreeable 
reality. 

Spleen, irritability — the pitiable infirmities of old men, which 
produce only pain to behold in the realities, counterfeited upon a 
stage, divert not altogether for the comic appendages to them, but 
in part from an inner conviction that they are being acted before 
us ; that a likeness only is going on, and not the thing itself, 
They please by being done under the life, or beside it ; not to the 
life. When Gattie acts an old man, is he angry indeed ? or only 
a pleasant counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to recognize, 
without pressing upon us the uneasy sense of a reality ? 

Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too natural. 
It was the case with a late actor. Nothing could be more ear- 
nest or true than the manner of Mr. Emery ; this told excellently 



STAGE ILLUSION. 215 

in his Tyke, and characters of a tragic cast. But when he car- 
ried the same rigid exclusiveness of attention to the stage busi- 
ness, and wilful blindness and oblivion of everything before the 
curtain into his comedy, it produced a harsh and dissonant effect. 
He was out of keeping with the rest of the Persona Dramatis. 
There was as little link between him and them, as betwixt him- 
self and the audience. He was a third estate, dry, repulsive, and 
unsocial to all. Individually considered, his execution was mas- 
terly. But comedy is not this unbending thing ; for this reason, 
that the same degree of credibility is not required of it as to seri- 
ous scenes. The degrees of credibility demanded to the two 
things, may be illustrated by the different sort of truth which we 
expect when a man tells us a mournful or a merry story. If we 
suspect the former of falsehood in any one tittle, we reject it alto- 
gether. Our tears refuse to flow at a suspected imposition. But 
the teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are 
content with less than absolute truth. ; Tis the same with dra- 
matic illusion. We confess we love in comedy to see an audi- 
ence naturalized behind the scenes, taken into the interest of the 
drama, welcomed as bystanders however. There is something 
ungracious in a comic actor holding himself aloof from all parti- 
cipation or concern with those who are come to be diverted by 
him. Macbeth must see the dagger, and no ear but his own be 
told of it ; but an old fool in farce may think that he sees some- 
thing, and by conscious words and looks express it, as plainly as 
he can speak, to pit, box, and gallery. When an impertinent in 
tragedy, as Osric, for instance, breaks in upon the serious pas- 
sions of the scene, we approve of the contempt with which^he is 
treated. But when the pleasant impertinent of comedy, in a 
piece purely meant to give delight, and raise mirth out of whim- 
sical perplexities, worries the studious man with taking up his 
leisure, or making his house his home, the same sort of contempt 
expressed (however natural) would destroy the balance of delight 
in the spectators. To make the intrusion comic, the actor who 
plays the annoyed man must a little desert nature ; he must, in 
short, be thinking of the audience, and express only so much dis- 
satisfaction and peevishness as is consistent with the pleasure of 
comedy. In other words, his perplexity must seem half put on. 



216 ELIA. 

If he repel the intruder with the sober set face of a man in ear- 
nest, and more especially if he deliver his expostulations in a tone 
which in the world must necessarily provoke a duel ; his real-life 
manner will destroy the whimsical and purely dramatic existence 
of the other character (which to render it comic demands an an- 
tagonist comicality on the part of the character opposed to it), and 
convert what was meant for mirth, rather than belief, into a 
downright piece of impertinence indeed, which would raise no 
diversion in us, but rather stir pain, to see inflicted in earnest 
upon any unworthy person. A very judicious actor (in most of 
his parts) seems to have fallen into an error of this sort in his 
playing with Mr. Wrench in the farce of Free and Easy. 

Many instances would be tedious ; these may suffice to show 
that comic acting at least does not always demand from the per- 
former that strict abstraction from all reference to an audience 
which is exacted of it ; but that in some cases a sort of compro- 
mise may take place, and all the purposes of dramatic delight be 
attained by a judicious understanding, not too openly announced, 
between the ladies and gentlemen — on both sides of the curtain. 



TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 2' 7 



TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 



Joyousest of once embodied spirits, whither at length hast thou 
flown ? to what genial region are we permitted to conjecture that 
thou hast flitted ? 

Art thou sowing thy wild oats yet (the harvest time was still 
to come with thee) upon casual sands of Avernus 1 or art thou 
enacting Rover (as we would gladlier think) by wandering Ely- 
sian streams ? 

This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief antics 
amongst us, was in truth anything but a prison to thee, as the 
vain Platonist dreams of this body to be no better than a county 
gaol, forsooth, or some house of durance vile, whereof the five 
senses are the fetters. Thou knewest better than to be in a 
hurry to cast off those gyves ; and had notice to quit, I fear, be- 
fore thou wert quite ready to abandon this fleshy tenement. It 
was thy Pleasure-House, thy Palace of Dainty Devices: thy 
Louvre, or thy White-Hall. 

What new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant now ? or when 
may we expect thy aerial house-warming 1 

Tartarus we know, and we have read of the Blessed Shades ; 
now cannot I intelligibly fancy thee in either. 

Is it too much to hazard a conjecture, that (as the schoolmen 
admitted a receptacle apart for Patriarchs and un-chrisom babes) 
there may exist — not far perchance from that store-house of all 
vanities, which Milton saw in vision — a Limbo somewhere for 
Players ? and that 

Up thither like aerial vapors fly 

Both all Stage things, and all that in Stage things 

Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame ? 



218 ELIA. 

All the unaccomplished works of Authors' hands, 
Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed, 
Damn'd upon earth, fleet thither — 
Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery. — 

There by the neighboring moon (by some not improperly sup- 
posed thy Regent Planet upon earth), mayst thou not still be act- 
ing thy managerial pranks, great disembodied Lessee ? but Les- 
see still, and still a manager. 

In Green Rooms, impervious to mortal eye, the muse beholds 
thee wielding posthumous empire. 

Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never plump on earth) circle thee 
in endlessly, and still their song is Fie on sinful Phantasy ! 

Magnificent were thy capriccios on this globe of earth, Robert 
William Elliston ! for as yet we know not thy new name in 
heaven. 

It irks me to think, that, stript of thy regalities, thou shouldst 
ferry over, a poor forked shade, in crazy Stygian wherry. Me- 
thinks I hear the old boatman, paddling by the weedy wharf, 
with raucid voice, bawling " Sculls, Sculls :" to which, with 
waving hand, and majestic action, thou deignest no reply, other 
than in two curt monosyllables, " No : Oars." 

But the laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between 
king, and cobbler ; manager, and call-boy ; and, if haply your 
dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your pas- 
sage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the 
shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer. 

But mercy ! what strippings, what tearing off of histrionic 
robes, and, private vanities ! what denudations to the bone, before 
the surly Ferryman will admit you to set a foot within his bat- 
tered lighter. 

Crowns, sceptres ; shield, sword, and truncheon ; thy own coro- 
nation robes (for thou hast brought the whole property-man's 
wardrobe with thee, enough to sink a navy) ; the judge's ermine ; 
the coxcomb's wig ; the snuff-box a la Foppington — all must over- 
board, he positively swears — and that Ancient Mariner brooks no 
denial ; for, since the tiresome monodrame of the old Thracian 
Harper, Charon, it is to be believed, hath shown small taste for 
theatricals. 



TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 219 

Ay, now 'tis done. You are just Doat- weight ; pur a et pula 
anima. 

But, bless me, how little you look ! 

So shall we all look — kings and keysars — stripped for the last 
voyage. 

But the murky rogue pushes off. Adieu, pleasant, and thrice 
pleasant shade ! with my parting thanks for many a heavy hour 
of life lightened by thy harmless extravaganzas, public or do- 
mestic. 

Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, leaving to 
his two brethren the heavy calendars — honest Rhadamanth, always 
partial to players, weighing their parti-colored existence here upon 
earth, — making account of the few foibles that may have shaded 
thy real life, as we call it (though, substantially, scarcely less a 
vapor than thy idlest vagaries upon the boards of Drury), as but 
of so many echoes, natural re-percussions, and results to be ex- 
pected from the assumed extravagancies of thy secondary or mock 
life, nightly upon the stage — after a lenient castigation, with rods 
lighter than those of Medusean ringlets, but just enough to " whip 
the offending Adam out of thee, 5 ' shall courteously dismiss thee 
at the right hand gate — the o. p. side of Hades — that conducts to 
masques and merry-makings in the Theatre Royal of Proserpine. 



220 ELIA 



ELLISTONIANA. 



a-WWWW, 



•My acquaintance, with the pleasant creature, whose loss we all 
deplore, was but slight. 

My first introduction to E., which afterwards ripened into an 
acquaintance a little on this side of intimacy, was over a counter 
in the Leamington Spa Library, then newly entered upon by a 
branch of his family. E., whom nothing misbecame — to auspi- 
cate, I suppose, the filial concern, and set it a-going with a lustre 
— was serving in person two damsels fair, who had come into the 
shop ostensibly to inquire for some new publication, but in reality 
to have a sight of the illustrious shopman, hoping some confer- 
ence. With what an air did he reach down the volume, dispas- 
sionately giving his opinion of the worth of the work in question, 
and launching out into a dissertation on the comparative merits 
with those of certain publications of a similar stamp, its rivals ! 
his enchanted customers fairly hanging on his lips, subdued to 
their authoritative sentence. So have I seen a gentleman in 
comedy acting the shopman. So Lovelace sold his gloves in 
King Street. I admired the histrionic art, by which he contrived 
to carry clean away every notion of disgrace, from the occupa- 
tion he had so generously submitted to ; and from that hour I 
judged him, with no after repentance, to be a person with whom 
it would be a felicity to be more acquainted. 

To descant upon his merits as a Comedian would be superflu- 
ous. With his blended private and professional habits alone 1 
have to do ; that harmonious fusion of the manners of the player 
into those of every-day life, which brought the stage boards into 
streets, and dining-parlors, and kept up the play when the play 
was ended. — " I like Wrench," a friend was saying to him one 
day, " because he is the same, natural, easy creature, on the 



ELLISTONIANA. 221 

stage, that he is off" " My case exactly," retorted Elliston — 
with a charming forgetfulness, that the converse of a proposition 
does not lead to the same conclusion — " I am the same person off 
the stage that I am on." The inference, at first sight, seems 
identical ; but examine it a little, and it confesses only, that the 
one performer was never, and the other always, acting. 

And in truth this was the charm of Elliston's private deport- 
ment. You had spirited performance always going on before 
your eyes, with nothing to pay. As where a monarch takes up 
his casual abode for a night, the poorest hovel which he honors by 
his sleeping in it, becomes ipso facto for that time a palace ; so 
wherever Elliston walked, sate, or stood still, there was the thea- 
tre. He carried about with him his pit, boxes, and galleries, and 
set up his portable playhouse at corners of streets, and in the 
market-places. Upon flintiest pavements he trod the boards still ; 
and if his theme chanced to be passionate, the green baize carpet 
of tragedy spontaneously rose beneath his feet. Now this was 
hearty, and showed a love for his art. So Apelles always paint- 
ed — in thought. So G. D. always poetises. I hate a lukewarm 
artist. I have known actors — and some of them of Elliston's own 
stamp — who shall have agreeably been amusing you in the part 
of a rake or a coxcomb, through the two or three hours of their 
dramatic existence ; but no sooner does the curtain fall with its 
leaden clatter, but a spirit of lead seems to seize on all their facul- 
ties. They emerge sour, morose persons, intolerable to their 
families, servants, &c. Another shall have been expanding your 
heart with generous deeds and sentiments, till it even beats with 
yearnings of universal sympathy ; you absolutely long to go home 
and do some good action. The play seems tedious, till you can 
get fairly out of the house, and realize your laudable intentions. 
At length the final bell rings, and this cordial representative of 
all that is amiable in the human breast steps forth — a miser. Ellis- 
ton was more of a piece. Did he play Ranger ? and did Ranger 
fill the general bosom of the town with satisfaction ? why should 
he not be Ranger, and diffuse the same cordial satisfaction among 
his private circles ? with his temperament, his animal spirits, his 
good-nature, his follies perchance, could he do better than identify 
himself with his impersonation ? Are we to like a pleasant rake 



222 ELIA. 

or coxcomb, on the stage, and give ourselves airs of aversion for 
the identical character, presented to us in actual life ? or what 
would the performer have gained by divesting himself of the im- 
personation ? Could the man Elliston have been essentially dif- 
ferent from his part, even if he had avoided to reflect to us studi- 
ously in private circles, the airy briskness, the forwardness, and 
'scape-goat trickeries of his prototype ? 

" But there is something not natural in this everlasting acting ; 
we want the real man." 

Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom you 
cannot, or will not see, under some adventitious trappings, which 
nevertheless sit not at all inconsistently upon him ? What if it 
is the nature of some men to be highly artificial ? The fault is 
least reprehensible in flayers. Cibber was his own Foppington, 
with almost as much wit as Vanburgh could add to it. 

" My conceit of his person," — it is Ben Jonson speaking of Lord 
Bacon, — " was never increased towards him by his place or honors. 
But I have and do reverence him for the greatness, that was only 
proper to himself; in that he seemed to me ever one of the great- 
est men, that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever 
prayed that Heaven would give him strength ; for greatness he 
could not want." 

The quality here commended was scarcely less conspicuous in 
the subject of these idle reminiscences than in my Lord Verulam. 
Those who have imagined that an unexpected elevation to the di- 
rection of a great London Theatre affected the consequence of 
Elliston, or at all changed his nature, knew not the essential \ 
greatness of the man whom they disparage. It was my fortune 
to encounter him near St. Dunstan's Church (which, with its 
punctual giants, is now no more than dust and a shadow), on the 
morning of his election to that high office. Grasping my hand 
with a look of significance, he only uttered, — " Have you heard 
the news V 9 — then with another look following up the blow, he 
subjoined, " I am the future Manager of Drury Lane Theatre." 
— Breathless as he saw me, he stayed not for congratulation or 
reply, but mutely stalked away leaving me to chew upon his new- 
blown dignities at leisure. In fact, nothing could be said to it. 



ELLISTONIANA. 223 

Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. This was in his 
great style. 

But was he less great (be witness, O ye Powers of Equanimity, 
that supported in the ruins of Carthage the consular exile, and 
more recently transmuted, for a more illustrious exile, the barren 
constableship of Elba into an image of Imperial France), when, 
in melancholy after-years, again, much near the same spot, I 
met him, when that sceptre had been wrested from his hand, and 
his dominion was curtailed to the petty managership and part 
proprietorship, of the small Olympic, Ms Elba ? He still played 
nightly upon the boards of Drury, but in parts, alas ! allotted to 
him, not magnificently distributed by him. Waiving his great 
loss as nothing, and magnificently sinking the sense of fallen ma- 
terial grandeur in the more liberal resentment of depreciations 
done to his more lofty intellectual pretensions, " Have you heard " 
(his customary exordium, — " have you heard," said he, " how 
they treat me ? they put me in comedy " Thought I — but his 
finger on his lips forbade any verbal interruption — " where could 
they have put you better ?" Then, after a pause — " Where I 
formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio," — and so again he 
stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for, responses. 

O, it was a rich scene, — but Sir A C , the best of 

story-tellers and surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as 
well as he sets a fracture, alone could do justice to it, — that I was 
a witness to, in the tarnished room (that had once been green) of 
that same little Olympic. There, after his deposition from Impe- 
rial Drury, he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was his 
" highest heaven ;" himself " Jove in his chair." There he sat 
in state, while before him, on complaint of prompter, was brought 
for judgment — how shall I describe her? — one of those little 
tawdry things that flirt at the tails of choruses — a probationer for 
the town, in either of its senses — the pertest little drab — a dirty 
fringe and appendage of the lamps' smoke — who, it seems, on 
some disapprobation expressed by a "highly respectable" audi- 
ence, — had precipitately quitted her station on the boards, and 
withdrawn her small talents in disgust. 

"And how dare you," said her manager, — assuming a censorial 
severity, which would have crushed the confidence of a Vestris, 



224 ELIA. 

and disarmed that beautiful Rebel herself of her professional 
caprices — I verily believe, he thought her standing before him — 
" how dare you, Madam, withdraw yourself without a notice from 
your theatrical duties ?" " I was hissed, Sir." " And you have 
the presumption to decide upon the taste of the town ?" "I don't 
know that, Sir, but I will never stand to be hissed/' was the sub- 
joinder of young Confidence — when gathering up his features 
into one significant mass of wonder, pity, and expostulatory indig- 
nation — in a lesson never to have been lost upon a creature less 
forward than she who stood before him — his words were these : 
" They have hissed me." 

'Twas the identical argument a fortiori, which the son of 
Peleus uses to Lycaon trembling- under his lance, to persuade him 
to take his destiny with a good grace. " I too am mortal." And 
it is to be believed that in both cases the rhetoric missed of its 
application, for want of a proper understanding with the faculties 
of the respective recipients. 

" Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was courteously 
conducting me over the benches of his Surrey Theatre, the last 
retreat, and recess, of his every-day waning grandeur. 

Those who knew Elliston, will know the manner in which he 
pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about to 
record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us 
in the Temple, to which I had superadded a preliminary haddock. 
After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet, not 
unrefreshed with the humbler sort of Jiquors, I made a sort of 
apology for the humility of the fare, observing that for my own 
part I never ate but one dish at dinner. " I too never eat but one 
thing at dinner," — was his reply — then after a pause — " reckon- 
ing fish as nothing." The manner was all. It was as if by one 
peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the 
savory esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving 
Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. 
This was greatness, tempered with considerable tenderness, to the 
feelings of his scanty but welcoming entertainer. 

Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston ! and not 
lessened in thy death, if report speak truly, which says that thou 
didst direct that thy mortal remains should repose under no in- 



ELLISTONIANA. 225 

scription but one of pure Latinity, Classical was thy bringing 
up ! and beautiful was the feeling on thy last bed, which, con- 
necting the man with the boy, took thee back to thy latest exer- 
cise of imagination, to the days when, undreaming of Theatres 
and Managerships, thou wert a scholar, and an early ripe one, 
under the roofs builded by the munificent and pious Colet. For 
thee the Pauline Muses weep. In elegies, that shall silence this 
crude prose, they shall celebrate thy praise. 

16 



226 ELIA. 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 



I am fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have said so 
before) at one or other of the Universities. Next to these my 
choice would fix me at some woody spot, such as the neighbor- 
hood of Henley affords in abundance, on the banks of my beloved 
Thames. But somehow or other my cousin contrives to wheedle 
me, once in three or four seasons, to a watering-place. Old 
attachments cling to her in spite of experience. We have been 
dull at Worthing one summer, duller at Brighton another, dullest 
at Eastbourn a third, and are at this moment doing dreary pen- 
ance at — Hastings ! — and all because we were happy many years 
ago for a brief week at Margate. That was our first sea-side 
experiment, and many circumstances combined to make it the 
most agreeable holiday of my life. We had neither of us seen 
the sea, and we had never been from home so long together in 
company. 

Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weather- 
beaten, sun-burnt captain, and his rough accommodations — ill ex- 
changed for the foppery and fresh-water mceness of the modern 
steam-packet ? To the winds and waves thou committedst thy 
goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes, and spells, 
and boiling caldrons. With the gales of heaven thou wentest 
swimmingly ; or, when it was their pleasure, stoodest still with 
sailor-like patience. Thy course was natural, not forced, as in 
a hot-bed ; nor didst thou go poisoning the breath of ocean with 
sulphureous smoke — a great sea chimera, chimneying and fur- 
nacing the deep ; or liker to that fire-god parching up Scamander. 

Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their coy re- 
luctant responses (yet to the suppression of anything like con- 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 227 

tempt) to the raw questions, which we of the great city would be 
ever and anon putting to them, as to the uses of this or that 
strange naval implement? 'Specially can I forget thee, thou 
happy medium, thou shade of refuge between us and them, con- 
ciliating interpreter of their skill to our simplicity, comfortable 
ambassador between sea and land ! — whose sailor-trousers did not 
more convincingly assure thee to be an adopted denizen of the 
former, than thy white cap, and whiter apron over them, with thy 
neat-figured practice in thy culinary vocation, bespoke thee to 
have been of inland nurture heretofore — a master cook of East- 
cheap ? How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, 
cook, mariner, attendant, chamberlain : here, there, like anothei 
Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier 
ministrations — not to assist the tempest, but, as if touched with a 
kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms which that 
untried motion might haply raise in our crude land-fancies. And 
when the o'er- washing billows drove us below deck (for it was 
far gone in October, and we had stiff and blowing weather), how 
did thy officious ministerings, still catering for our comfort, with 
cards, and cordials, and thy more cordial conversation, alleviate 
the closeness and the confinement of thy else (truth to say) not 
very savory, nor very inviting, little cabin ? 

With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow- passen- 
ger, whose discourse in variety might have beguiled a longer voyage 
than we meditated, and have made mirth and wonder abound as 
far as the Azores. He was a dark, Spanish-complexioned young 
man, remarkably handsome, with an officer-like assurance, and 
an insuppressible volubility of assertion. He was, in fact, the 
greatest liar I had met with then, or since. He was none of your 
hesitating, half story-tellers (a most painful description of mortals) 
who go on sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as 
they see you can swallow at a time — the nibbling pickpockets of 
your patience — but one who committed downright, day-light depre- 
dations upon his neighbor's faith. He did not stand shivering upon 
the brink, but was a hearty, thorough-paced liar, and plunged at 
once into the depths of your credulity. I partly believe, he made 
pretty sure of his company. Not many rich, not many wise, or 
learned, composed at that time the common stowage of a Margate 



228 ELIA. 

packet. We were, I am afraid, a set 'of as unseasoned Londoners 
(let our enemies give it a worse name) as Aldermanbury, or 
Watling-street, at that time of day could have supplied. There 
might be an exception or two among us, but I scorn to make any 
invidious distinctions among such a jolly, companionable ship's 
company, as those were whom I sailed with. Something too 
must be conceded to the Genius Loci. Had the confident fellow 
told us half the legends on land, which he favored us with on the 
other element, I flatter myself the good sense of most of us would 
have revolted. But we were in a new world, with everything 
unfamiliar about us, and the time and place disposed us to the 
reception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time has obli- 
terated from my memory much of his wild fablings ; and the rest 
would appear but dull, as written, and to be read on shore. He 
had been Aide-de-camp (among other rare accidents, and for- 
tunes) to a Persian Prince, and at one blow had stricken off the 
head of the King of Carimania on ' horseback. He, of course, 
married the Prince's daughter. I forget what unlucky turn in 
the politics of that court, combining with the loss of his consort, 
was the reason of his quitting Persia ; but, with the rapidity of a 
magician, he transported himself, along with his hearers, back to 
England, where we still found him in the confidence of great ladies. 
There was some story of a princess — Elizabeth, if I remember — 
having intrusted to his care an extraordinary casket of jewels, 
upon some extraordinary occasion — but, as I am not certain of 
the name or circumstance at this distance of time, I must leave it 
to the Royal daughters of England to settle the honor among 
themselves in private. I cannot call to mind half of his pleasant 
wonders ; but I perfectly remember, that in the course of his 
travels he had seen a phoenix ; and he obligingly undeceived us 
of the vulgar error, that there is but one of that species at a time, 
assuring us that they were not uncommon in some parts of 
Upper Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. 
His dreaming fancies had transported us beyond the " ignorant 
present." But when (still hardying more and more in his tri- 
umphs over our simplicity) he went on to affirm that he had 
actually sailed through the legs of the Colossus at Rhodes, it 
really became necessary to make a stand. And here I must do 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 2:29 

justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one of our party, a 
youth, that had hitherto been one of his most deferential auditors, 
who, from his recent reading, made bold to assure the gentleman, 
that there must be some mistake, as " the Colossus in question 
had been destroyed long since ;" to whose opinion, delivered with 
all modesty, our hero was obliging enough to concede thus much, 
that " the figure was indeed a little damaged." This was the 
only opposition he met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger 
him, for he proceeded with his fables, which the same youth appear- 
ed to swallow with still more complacency than ever, — confirmed, 
as it were, by the extreme candor of that concession. With these 
prodigies he wheedled us on till we came in sight of the Reculvers, 
which one of our own company (having been the voyage before) 
immediately recognizing, and pointing out to us, was considered 
by us as no ordinary seaman. 

All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a different 
character. It was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, and 
very patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile ; and, 
if he caught now and then some snatches of these wild legends, 
it was by accident, and they seemed not to concern him. The 
waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one, 
being with us, but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring 
without stirring ; and when some of us pulled out our private 
stores — our cold meat and our salads — he produced none, and 
seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit he had laid in ; 
provision for the one or two days and nights, to which these ves- 
sels then were oftentimes obliged to prolong their voyage. Upon 
a nearer acquaintance with him, which he seemed neither to court 
nor decline, we learned that he was going to Margate, with the 
hope of being admitted into the Infirmary there for sea-bathing. 
His disease was a scrofula, which appeared to have eaten all over 
him. He expressed great hope of a cure ; and when we asked 
him, whether he had any friends where he was going, he replied, 
" he had no friends. 55 

These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with the first sight 
of the sea, co-operating with youth, and a sense of holidays, and 
out-of-door adventure, to me that had been pent up in populous 
cities for many months before, — have left upon my mind the fra- 



230 ELIA. 

grance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their 
remembrance for cold and wintry hours to chew upon. 

Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwelcome 
comparisons), if I endeavor to account for the dissatisfaction which 
I have heard so many persons confess to have felt (as I did my- 
self feel in part on this occasion), at the sight of the sea for the first 
time ? I think the reason usually given — referring to the inca- 
pacity of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions of them — 
scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the same per- 
son see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in his 
life, and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The 
things do not fill up that space, which the idea of them seemed to 
take up in his mind. But they have still a correspondency to his 
first notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very 
similar impression : enlarging themselves (if I may say so) upon 
familiarity. But the sea remains a disappointment. — Is it not, that 
in the latter we had expected to behold (absurdly, I grant, but I 
am afraid, by the law of imagination, unavoidably) not a definite 
object, as those wild beasts, or that mountain compassable by the 
eye, but all the sea at once, the commensurate antagonist of 
the earth ? I do not say we tell ourselves so much, but the 
craving of the mind is to be satisfied with nothing less. I will 
suppose the case of a young person of fifteen (as I then was) 
knowing nothing of the sea, but from description. He comes to 
it for the first time — all that he has been reading of it all his life, 
and that the most enthusiastic part of life, — all he has gathered 
from narratives of wandering seamen, — what he has gained from 
true voyages, and what he cherishes as credulously from romance 
and poetry, — crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes 
from expectation. — He thinks of the great deep, and of those who 
go down unto it ; of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents 
it washes ; of its receiving the mighty Plate, or Orellana, into its 
bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation ; of Biscay 
swells, and the mariner 

For many a day, and many a dreadful night, 
Incessant laboring round the stormy Cape ; 

of fatal rocks, and the (l still-vexed Bermoothes;" of great whirl- 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 231 

pools, and the waterspout ; of sunken ships, and sumless treasures 
swallowed up in the unrestoring depths ; of fishes and quaint 
monsters, to which all that is terrible on earth — 

Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal, 
Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral ; 

of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez ; of pearls, and shells ; 
of coral beds, and of enchanted isles ; of mermaids' grots — 

I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown all 
these wonders at once, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty 
faculty, which haunts him with confused hints and shadows of all 
these ; and when the actual object opens first upon him, seen (in 
tame weather, too, most likely) from our unromantic coasts — a 
speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him — what can it prove 
but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive entertainment ! Or 
if he has come to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more 
than the river widening ? and, even out of sight of land, what 
had he but a flat watery horizon about him, nothing comparable 
to the vast o'er-curtaining sky, his familiar object, seen daily with- 
out dread or amazement % — Who, in similar circumstances, has 
not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of Gebir, 

Is this the mighty ocean ? is this all ? 

1 love town, or country ; but this detestable Cinque Port is 
neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved 
foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritious 
rocks ; which the amateur calls " verdure to the edge of the sea." 
I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out 
for the water brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland mur- 
murs. I cannot stand all day on the naked beach, watching the 
capricious hues of the sea, shifting like the colors of a dying 
mullet. I am tired of looking out at the windows of this island- 
prison. I would fain retire into the interior of my cage. While 
I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, across it. It binds 
me in with chains, as of iron. My thoughts are abroad. I should 
not so feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. 
There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive 



282 ELIA. 

resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stock- 
brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the 
Ocean. If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what 
it ought to have remained, a fair, honest fishing-town, and no more, 
it were something — with a few straggling fishermen's huts scat- 
tered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched 
from them, it were something. I could abide to dwell with Me- 
schek ; to assort with fisher-swains, and smugglers. There are, 01 
I dream there are, many of this latter occupation here. Their 
faces become the place, I like a smuggler. He is the only honest 
thief. He robs nothing but the revenue — an abstraction I nevei 
greatly cared about. I could go out with them in their mackerel 
boats, or about their less ostensible business, with some satisfac- 
tion. I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who 
from day to day pace along the beach, in endless progress and re- 
currence, to watch their illicit countrymen — townsfolk or brethren 
perchance — whistling to the sheathing and unsheathing of their 
cutlasses (their only solace), who, under the mild name of pre- 
ventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the deplor- 
able absence of a foreign one, to show their detestation of run 
hollands, and zeal for Old England. But it is the visitants from 
town, that come here to say that they have been here, with no 
more relish of the sea than a pond-perch or a dace might be sup- 
posed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace in 
these regions, and have as little toleration for myself here, as for 
them. What can they want here ? if they had a true relish of 
the ocean, why have they brought all this land luggage with them ? 
or why pitch their civilized tents in the desert % What mean these 
scanty book-rooms — marine libraries as they entitle them — if the 
sea were, as they would have us believe, a book " to read strange 
matter in V 9 what are their foolish concert-rooms, if they come, as 
they would fain be thought to do, to listen to the music of the 
waves ? All is false and hollow pretension. They come, because 
it is the fashion, and to spoil the nature of the place. They are, 
mostly, as I have said, stock-brokers; but I have watched the 
better sort of them — now and then an honest citizen (of the old 
stamp), in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife 
and daughters, to taste the sea breezes. I always know the date 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 233 

of their arrival. It is easy to see it in their countenances. A day 
or two they go wandering on the shingles, picking up cockle-shells, 
and thinking them great things ; but, in a poor week, imagination 
slackens : they begin to discover that cockles produce no pearls, 
and then — O then ! — if I could interpret for the pretty creatures 
(I know they have not the courage to confess it themselves), how 
gladly would they exchange their sea-side rambles for a Sunday 
walk on the green-sward of their accustomed Twickenham 
meadows ! 

I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think 
they truly love the sea, with its wild usages, what would their 
feelings be, if some of the unsophisticated aborigines of this place, 
encouraged by their courteous questionings here, should venture, 
on the faith of such assured sympathy between them, to return 
the visit, and come up to see — London. 1 must imagine them 
with their fishing-tackle on their back, as we carry our town 
necessaries. What a sensation would it cause in Lothbury ? 
What vehement laughter would it not excite among 

The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard-street ! 

1 am sure that no town-bred or inland-born subjects can feel 
their true and natural nourishment at these sea-places. Nature, 
where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bids us 
stay at home. The salt foam seems to nourish a spleen. I am 
not half so good-natured as by the milder waters of my natural 
river. I would exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a 
swallow for ever about the banks of Thamesis. 



234 ELIA. 



THE CONVALESCENT. 



A pretty severe fit of indisposition which, under the name of a 
nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, 
and is but slowly leaving me, has reduced me to an incapacity of 
reflecting upon any topic foreign to itself. Expect no healthy 
conclusions from me this month, reader ; 1 can offer you only 
sick men's dreams. 

And truly the whole state of sickness is such ; for what else 
is it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw 
daylight curtains about him ; and, shutting out the sun, to induce 
a total oblivion of all the works which are going on under it ? 
To become insensible to all the operations of life, except the beat- 
ings of one feeble pulse ? 

If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient 
lords it there ; what caprices he acts without control ! how king- 
like he sways his pillow — tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and 
lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever- 
varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. 

He changes sides oftener than a politician. Now he lies full 
length, then half-length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet 
quite across the bed ; and none accuses him of tergiversation. 
Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare 
Clausum. 

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to him- 
self! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is 
inculcated upon him as his only duty. 'Tis the Two Tables of 
the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get 
well. What passes out of doors, or within them, so he hear not 
the jarring of them, affects him not. 



THE CONVALESCENT. 235 

A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the event of a 
lawsuit, which was to be the making or the marring of his dearest 
friend. He was to be seen trudging about upon this man's errand 
to fifty quarters of the town at once, jogging this witness, refresh- 
ing that solicitor. The cause was to come on yesterday. He is 
absolutely as indifferent to the decision, as if it were a question 
to be tried at Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going 
on about the house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up 
enough to make him understand, that things went cross-grained in 
the Court yesterday, and his friend is ruined. But the word 
" friend," and the word " ruin," disturb him no more than so much 
jargon. He is not thinking of anything but how to get better. 

What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorbing 
consideration ! 

He has put on the strong armor of sickness, he is wrapped in 
the callous hide of suffering ; he keeps his sympathy, like some 
curious vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own use only. 

He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he 
yearneth over himself; his bowels are even melted within him, 
to think what he suffers ; he is not ashamed to weep over himself. 

He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself ; study- 
ing little stratagems and artificial alleviations. 

He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allow- 
able fiction, into as many distinct individuals, as he hath sore and 
sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates — as of a thing apart 
from him — upon his poor aching head, and that dull pain which, 
dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpa- 
ble substance of pain, not to be removed without opening the very 
skull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, 
clammy, attenuated fingers. He compassionates himself all over ; 
and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and tender heart. 

He is his own sympathizer ; and instinctively feels that none 
can so well perform that office for him. He cares for few spec- 
tators to his tragedy. Only that punctual face of the old nurse 
pleases him, that announces his broths and his cordials. He 
likes it because it is so unmoved, and because he can pour forth 
his feverish ejaculations before it as unreservedly as to his bed- 
post. 



236 ELIA. 

To the world's business he is dead. He understands not what 
the callings and occupations of mortals are ; only he has a glim- 
mering conceit of some such thing, when the doctor makes his 
daily call : and even in the lines on that busy face he reads no 
multiplicity of patients, but solely conceives of himself as the sick 
man. To what other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, 
when he slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so 
carefully, for fear of rustling — is no speculation which he can at 
present entertain. He thinks only of the regular return of the 
same phenomenon at the same hour to-morrow. 

Household rumors touch him not. Some faint murmur, indi- 
cative of life going on within the house, soothes him, while he 
knows not distinctly what it is. He is not to know anything, not 
to think of anything. Servants gliding up or down the distant 
staircase, treading as upon velvet, gently keep his ear awake, so 
long as he troubles not himself further than with some feeble 
guess at their errands. Exacter knowledge would be a burthen 
to him : he can just endure the pressure of conjecture. He opens 
his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the muffled knocker, and 
closes it again without asking " Who was it ?" He is flattered 
by a general notion that inquiries are making after him, but he 
cares not to know the name of the inquirer. In the general still- 
ness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his 
sovereignty. 

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare the 
silent tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which 
he is served — with the careless demeanor, the unceremonious 
goings in and out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the 
very same attendants, when he is getting a little better — and you 
will confess, that from the bed of sickness (throne let me rather 
call it) to the elbow-chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity, 
amounting to a deposition. 

How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature ! 
where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, 
in the family's eye ? 

The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was the pre- 
sence chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic fancies — how 
is it reduced to a common bed-room ? The trimness of the very 



THE CONVALESCENT. 237 

bed has something petty and unmeaning about it. It is made 
every day. How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic 
surface, which it presented so short a time since, when to make it 
was a service not to be thought of at oftener than three or four 
day revolutions, when the patient was with pain and grief to be 
lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the encroachments of 
unwelcome neatness, and decencies which his shaken frame 
deprecated ; then to be lifted into it again, for another three or 
four days' respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every 
fresh furrow was an historical record of some shifting posture, 
some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease ; and the 
shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled 
coverlid. 

Hushed are those mysterious sighs — those groans — so much 
more awful, while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden 
suffering they proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quenched. 
The riddle of sickness is solved ; and Philoctetes is become an 
ordinary personage. 

Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness 
survives in the still lingering visitations of the medical attendant. 
But how is he, too, changed with everything else ! Can this be he 
— this man of news — of chat — of anecdote — of everything but 
physic — can this be he, who so lately came between the patient 
and his cruel enemy, as on solemn embassy from Nature, erect- 
ing herself into a high mediating party ? — Pshaw ! 'tis some old 
woman. 

Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous — the spell 
that hushed the household — the desert-like stillness, felt through- 
out its inmost chambers — the mute attendance — the inquiry by 
looks — the still softer delicacies of self- attention — the sole and 
single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon itself — world-thoughts 
excluded — the man a world unto himself — his own theatre — 

What a speck is he dwindled into ! 

In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, 
yet far enough from the terra firma of established health, your 
note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting — an article. In ArtL 



288 ELIA. 

culo Mortis, thought I ; but it is something hard — and the 
quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me. The summons, unsea- 
sonable as it appeared, seemed to link me on again to the petty 
businesses of life, which I had lost sight of; a gentle call to 
activity, however trivial ; a wholesome weaning from that pre- 
posterous dream of self- absorption — the puffy state of sickness — 
in which I confess to have lain so long, insensible to the maga- 
zines and monarchies of the world alike ; to its laws, and to its 
literature. The hypochondriac flatus is subsiding; the acres, 
which in imagination I had spread over — for the sick man swells 
in the sole contemplation of his single sufferings, till he becomes a 
Tityus to himself — are wasting to a span ; and for the giant of 
self-importance, which I was so lately, you have me again in my 
natural pretensions — the lean and meagre figure of your insigni- 
ficant Essayist. 



SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS 23y 



SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 



So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, n 
our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with 
insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to 
be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive 
of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic 
talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the 
admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the dispropor- 
tionate straining or excess of any one of them. " So strong a 
wit," says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend, 

" did Nature to him frame, 

As all things but his judgment overcame ; 

His judgment like the heavenly moon did show, 

Tempering that mighty sea below." 

The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures 
of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have 
no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resem- 
blance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess 
and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. 
He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it. In 
the groves of Eden he walks familiarly as in his native paths. 
He ascends the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He 
treads the burning mar) without dismay ; he wings his flight with- 
out self-loss through realms of chaos " and old night." Or if, 
abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a " human mind 
untuned," he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate 
mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, 
nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that, — never letting the 



240 ELIA. 

reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so, — he has 
his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good servant 
Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest steward 
Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems 
most to recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it. 
From beyond the scope of Nature if he summon possible exist- 
ences, he subjugates them to the law of her consistency. He is 
beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, even when he 
appears most to betray and desert her. His ideal tribes submit 
to policy ; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that 
wild sea-brood, shepherded by Proteus. He tames, and he clothes 
them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they wonder at them- 
selves, like the Indian Islanders forced to submit to European 
vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their 
own nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and Mac- 
beth. Herein the great and the little wits are differenced ; that 
if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, 
they lose themselves, and their readers. Their phantoms are 
lawless ; their visions night-mares. They do not create, which 
implies shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not 
active — for to be active is to call something into act and form — 
but passive, as men in sick dreams. For the super-natural, or 
something super- added to what we know of nature, they give you 
the plainly non-natural. And if this were all, and that these 
mental hallucinations were discoverable only in the treatment of 
subjects out of nature, or transcending it, the judgment might with 
some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonised : but 
even in the describing of real and every-day life, that which is 
before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from 
nature — show more of that inconsequence, which has a natura 
alliance with frenzy, — than a great genius in his " maddest fits," 
as Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal to any one that 
is acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels, — as they 
existed some twenty or thirty years back, — those scanty intellec- 
tual viands of the whole female reading public, till a happier 
genius arose, and expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms, — 
whether he has not found his brain more " betossed," his memory 
more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, 



SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 241 

among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the incon- 
sistent characters, or no-characters, of some third-rate love-intrigue 
— where the person shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss 
Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond- 
street — a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than 
he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In 
the productions we refer to, nothing but names and places is 
familiar ; the persons are neither of this world nor of any other 
conceivable one ; an endless string of activities without purpose, 
of purposes destitute of motive : — we meet phantoms in our known 
walks ; fantasques only christened. In the poet we have names 
which announce fiction ; and we have absolutely no place at all, 
for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their 
" whereabout. " But in their inner nature, and the law of their 
speech and actions, we are at home and upon acquainted ground. 
The one turns life into a dream ; the other to the wildest dreams 
gives the sobrieties of every day occurrences. By what subtle 
art of tracing the mental processes it is effected, we are not philo- 
sophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode of the 
cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the 
lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes 
the god of all the treasures of the world ; and has a daughter, 
Ambition, before whom all the world kneels for favors — with the 
Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his 
hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the same stream — that we 
should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, 
at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, 
all at once, with the shifting mutations of the most rambling 
dream, and our judgment yet all the time awake, and neither 
able nor willing to detect the fallacy, — is a proof of that hidden 
sanity which still guides the poet in the widest seeming-aberra- 
tions. 

It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the 
mind's conceptions in sleep ; it is, in some sort — but what a copy ! 
Let the most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night 
with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine 
it in the morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That which 
appeared so shifting and yet so coherent, while that faculty was 
17 



242 ELIA. 

passive, when it comes under cool examination shall appear so 
reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so 
deluded ; and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a 
god. But the transactions in this episode are every whit as vio- 
lent as in the most extravagant dream, and yet the waking judg- 
ment ratifies them. 



CAPTAIN JACKSON. 243 



CAPTAIN JACKSON. 



Among the deaths in our obituary for this month, I observe with 
concern, " At his cottage on the Bath road, Captain Jackson." 
The name and attribution are common enough ; but a feeling like 
reproach persuades me, that this could have been no other in fact 
than my dear old friend, who some five- and- twenty years ago 
rented a tenement, which he was pleased to dignify with the 
appellation here used, about a mile from Westbourn Green. 
Alack, how good men, and the good turns they do, slide out of 
memory, and are recalled but by the surprise of some such sad 
memento as that which now lies before us ! 

He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, with a wife 
and two grown-up daughters, whom he maintained with the port 
and notions of gentlewomen upon that slender professional allow- 
ance. Comely girls they were too. 

And was I in danger of forgetting this man ? — his cheerful sup- 
pers — the noble tone of hospitality, when first you set your foot 
in the cottage — the anxious ministerings about you, where little or 
nothing (God knows) was to be ministered. — Althea's horn in a 
poor platter — the power of self- enchantment, by which, in his 
magnificent wishes to entertain you, he multiplied his means to 
bounties. 

You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare 
scrag — cold savings from the foregone meal — remnant hardly suf- 
ficient to send a mendicant from the door contented. But in the 
copious will — the revelling imagination of your host — the " mind, 
the mind, Master Shallow," whole beeves were spread before you 
— hecatombs — no end appeared to the profusion. 

It was the widow's cruse — the loaves and fishes ; carving could 



244 ELIA. 

not lessen, nor helping diminish it — the stamina were left — the 
elemental bone still flourished, divested of its accidents. 

" Let us live while we can/ 5 methinks I hear the open-handed 
creature exclaim ; " while we have, let us not want," " here is 
plenty left;" "want for nothing" — with many more such hos- 
pitable sayings, the spurs of appetite, and old concomitants of 
smoking-boards, and feast-oppressed chargers. Then sliding a 
^lender ratio of Single Gloucester upon his wife's plate, or the 
daughters', he would convey the remanent rind into his own, with 
a merry quirk of " the nearer the bone," &c, and declaring that 
he universally preferred the outside. For we had our table dis- 
tinctions, you are to know, and some of us in a manner sate above 
the salt. None but his guest or guests dreamed of tasting luxu- 
ries at night, the fragments were vere Tiospitibus sacra. But of 
one thing or another there was always enough, and leavings: 
only he would sometimes finish the remainder crust, to show that 
he wished no savings. 

Wine we had none ; nor, except on very rare occasions, spirits ; 
but the sensation of wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I 
remember — " British beverage," he would say ! " Push about, 
my boys ;" " drink to your sweethearts, girls." At every meagre 
draught a toast must ensue, or a song. All the forms of good 
liquor were there, with none of the effects wanting. Shut your 
eyes, and you would swear a capacious bowl of punch was foam- 
ing in the centre, with beams of generous Port or Madeira, radi- 
ating to it from each of the table corners. You got flustered, 
without knowing whence ; tipsy upon words ; and reeled under 
the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian encouragements. 

We had our songs — " Why, Soldiers, why" — and the "British 
Grenadiers " — in which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. 
Both the daughters sang. Their proficiency was a nightly theme 
— the masters he had given them — the " no-expense " which he 
spared to accomplish them in a science " so necessary to young 
women." But then — they could not sing "without the instru- 
ment." 

Sacred, and, by me, never-to-be-violated, secrets of Poverty ! 
Should I disclose your honest aims at grandeur, your makeshift 
efforts of magnificence ? Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, 



CAPTAIN JACKSON. 245 

if one of the bunch be extant ; thrummed by a thousand ances- 
tral thumbs ; dear, cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa ! Without 
mention of mine, be dumb, thou thin accompanier of her thinner 
warble ! A veil be spread over the dear delighted face of the 
well-deluded father, who now haply listening to cherubic notes, 
scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when she awakened thy time- 
shaken chords responsive to the twitterings of that slender image 
of a voice. 

We were not without our literary talk either. It did not ex- 
tend far, but as far as it went, it was good. It was bottomed well ; 
had good grounds to go upon. In the cottage was a room, which 
tradition authenticated to have been the same in which Glover, in 
his occasional retirements, had penned the greater part of his 
Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly quoted, though none 
of the present inmates, that I could discover, appeared ever to 
have met with the poem in question. But that was no matter. 
Glover had written there, and the anecdote was pressed into the 
account of the family importance. It diffused a learned air 
through the apartment, the little side casement of which (the 
poet's study window), opening upon a superb view as far as the 
pretty spire of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial acres, not 
a rood nor square yard whereof our host could call his own, yet 
gave occasion to an immoderate expansion of — vanity shall I call 
it ? — in his bosom, as he showed them in a glowing summer 
evening. It was all his, he took it all in, and communicated rich 
portions of it to his guests. It was a part of his largess, his hos- 
pitality ; it was going over his grounds ; he was lord for the time 
of showing them, and you the implicit lookers-up to his magnifi- 
cence. 

He was a juggler, who threw mists before your eyes — you 
had no time to detect his fallacies. He would say, " Hand me 
the silver sugar tongs ; w and before you could discover it was a 
single spoon, ana that plated, he would disturb and captivate your 
imagination by a misnomer of " the urn" for a tea-kettle ; or by 
calling a homely bench a sofa. Rich men direct you to their 
furniture, poor ones divert you from it ; he neither did one nor 
the other, but by simply assuming that everything was handsome 
about him, you were positively at a demur what you did, or did 



246 ELIA. 

not see, at the cottage. With nothing to live on, he seemed to 
live on everything. He had a stock of wealth in his mind ; not 
that which is properly termed Content, for in truth he was not to 
be contained at all, but overflowed all bounds by the force of a 
magnificent self-delusion. 

Enthusiasm is catching ; and even his wife, a sober native of 
North Britain, who generally saw things more as they were, was 
not proof against the continual collision of his credulity. Her 
daughters were rational and discreet young women ; in the main, 
perhaps, not insensible to their true circumstances. I have seen 
them assume a thoughtful air at times. But such was the pre- 
ponderating opulence of his fancy, that I am persuaded, not for 
any half hour together did they ever look their own prospects 
fairly in the face. There was no resisting the vortex of his tern- 
perament. His riotous imagination conjured up handsome settle- 
ments before their eyes, which kept them up in the eye of the 
world too, and seem at last to have realized themselves; for 
they both have married since, I am told, more than respectably. 

It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some subjects, 
or I should wish to convey some notion of the manner in 
which the pleasant creature described the circumstances of his 
own wedding-day. I faintly remember something of a chaise- 
and-four, in which he made his entry into Glasgow on that morn- 
ing to fetch the bride home, or carry her thither, I forget which. 
It so completely made out the stanza of the old ballad — 

When we came down through Glasgow town. 

We were a comely sight to see ; 
My love was clad in black velvet, 

And I myself in cramasie. 

I suppose it was the only occasion upon which his own actual 
splendor at all corresponded with the world's notions on that sub- 
ject. In homely cart, or travelling caravan, by whatever humble 
vehicle they chanced to be transported in less prosperous days, 
the ride through Glasgow came back upon his fancy, not as a 
humiliating contrast, but as a fair occasion for reverting to that 
one day's state. It seemed an " equipage etern " from which no 



CAPTAIN JACKSON 24*7 

power of fate or fortune, once mounted, had power thereafter to 
dislodge him. 

There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent 
circumstances. To bully and swagger away the sense of them 
before strangers, may not be always discommendable. Tibbs, 
and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our admiration 
than contempt. But for a man to put the cheat upon himself; to 
play the Bobabil at home ; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, 
to fancy himself all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of 
constitutional philosophy, and a mastery over fortune, which was 
reserved for my old friend Captain Jackson. 



248 ELI A. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 



Sera tamen respexit 
Libertas. Virgil. 

A Clerk I was in London gay. 

O'Keefe. 

If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden 
years of thy life — thy shining youth — in the irksome confinement 
of an office ; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle 
age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release 
or respite ; to have lived to forget that there are such things as 
holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of child- 
hood ; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my 
deliverance. 

- It is now six-and-thirty years since I took my seat at the desk 
in Mincing-lane. Melancholy was the transition at fourteen from 
the abundant playtime, and the frequently intervening vacations 
of school-days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours' a-day 
at a counting-house. But time partially reconciles us to any- 
thing. I gradually became content — doggedly contented, as wild 
animals in cages. 

It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sundays, admira- 
ble as the institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for 
that very reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending 
and recreation. In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant 
upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the cheerful 
cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers — the buzz and 
stirring murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. 
The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 249 

and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostenta- 
tiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which make a week-day 
saunter through the less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful 
— are shut out. No book-stalls deliciously to idle over — no busy 
faces to recreate the idle man who contemplates them ever pass- 
ing by — the very face of business a charm by contrast to his 
temporary relaxation from it. Nothing to be seen but unhappy 
countenances — or half-happy at best — of emancipated 'prentices 
and little tradesfolks, with here and there a servant maid that has 
got leave to go out, who, slaving all the week, with the habit has 
lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free hour ; and livelily ex- 
pressing the hollowness of a day's pleasuring. The very stroll- 
ers in the fields on that day look anything but comfortable. 

But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at 
Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself 
in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great 
indulgence ; and the prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone 
kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. 
But when the week came round, did the glittering phantom of 
the distance keep touch with me 1 or rather was it not a series of 
seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a 
wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them ? 
Where was the quiet, where the promised rest ? Before I had a 
taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting 
upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such 
another snatch would come. Still the prospect of its coming 
threw something of an illumination upon the darker side of my 
captivity. Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sus- 
tained my thraldom. 

Independently of the rigors of attendance, I have ever been 
haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for 
business. This, during my latter years, has increased to such a 
degree, that it was visible in all the lines of my countenance. 
My health and my good spirits flagged. I had perpetually a 
dread of some crisis, to which I should be found unequal. Be- 
sides my daylight servitude, I served over again all night in my 
sleep, and would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, 
errors in my accounts, and the like. I was fifty years of age, 



250 EL1A. 

and no prospect of emancipation presented itself. I had grown to 
my desk, as it were ; and the wood had entered into my soul. 

My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me upon the 
trouble legible in my countenance ; but I did not know that it 
had raised the suspicions of any of my employers, when, on the 

5th of last month, a day ever to be remembered by me, L , 

the junior partner in the firm, calling me on one side, directly 
taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly inquired the cause of 
them. So taxed, I honestly made confession of my infirmity, and 
added that I was afraid I should eventually be obliged to resign 
his service. He spoke some words of course to hearten me, and 
there the matter rested. A whole week I remained laboring un- 
der the impression that I had acted imprudently in my disclosure ; 
that I had foolishly given a handle against myself, and had been 
anticipating my own dismissal. A week passed in this manner, 
the most anxious one, I verily believe, in my whole life, when on 
the evening of the 12th of April, just as I was about quitting my 
desk to go home (it might be about eight o'clock) I received an 
awful summons to attend the presence of the whole assembled 
firm in the formidable back parlor. I thought now my time is 
surely come, I have done for myself, I am going to be told that 

they have no longer occasion for me. L , I could see, smiled 

at the terror I was in, which was a little relief to me, — when to 

my utter astonishment B , the eldest partner, began a formal 

harangue to me on the length of my services, my very meritori- 
ous conduct during the whole of the time (the deuce, thought I, 
how did he find out that ? I protest I never had the confidence 
to think as much). He went on to descant on the expediency of 
retiring at a certain time of life (how my heart panted !), and 
asking me a few questions as to the amount of my own property, 
of which I have a little, ended with a proposal, to which his three 
partners nodded a grave assent, that I should accept from the 
house, which I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount 
of two-thirds of my accustomed salary — a magnificent offer ! I 
do not know what I answered between surprise and gratitude, but 
it was understood that I accepted their proposal, and I was told 
that I was free from that hour to leave their service. I stam- 
mered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 251 

for ever. This noble benefit — gratitude forbids me to conceal 
their names — I owe to the kindness of the most munificent firm in 
the world — the house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, and 
Lacy. 

Estoperpetua ! 

For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could 
only apprehend my felicity ; I was too confused to taste it sin- 
cerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy, and knowing 
that I was not. I was in the condition of a prisoner in the old 
Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confinement. I 
could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out 
of Time into Eternity — for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to 
have his Time all to himself. It seemed to me that I had more 
time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, 
poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue ; I 
could see no end of my possessions ; I wanted some steward, or 
judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And 
here let me caution persons grown old in active business, not 
lightly, nor without weighing their own resources, to forego their 
customary employment all at once, for there may be danger in it. 
I feel it by myself, but I know that my resources are sufficient ; and 
now that those first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a quiet 
home-feeling of the blessedness of my condition. I am in no 
hurry. Having all holidays, I am as though I had none. If 
Time hung heavy upon me, I could walk it away ; but I do not 
walk all day long, as I used to do in those old transient holidays, 
thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. If Time were 
troublesome, I could read it away ; but I do not read in that vio- 
lent measure, with which, having no time my own but candle 
light Time, I used to weary out my head and eyesight in by- 
gone winters. I walk, read, or scribble (as now), just when the 
fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure ; I let it come to 
me. I am like the man 

that's born, and has his years come to him 

In some green desert 

"Years!" you will say; "what is this superannuated sim- 



252 ELIA. 

pleton calculating upon ? He has already told us that he is past 
fifty.- 

I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of 
them the hours which I have lived to other -people, and not to 
myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is 
the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own, that 
which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he 
may be said to live it, is other people's Time, not his. The 
remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for 
me threefold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as 
long as any preceding thirty. 'Tis a fair rule-of-three sum. 

Among the strange fantasies which beset me at the commence- 
ment of my freedom, and of which all traces are not yet gone, 
one was, that a vast tract of time had intervened since I quitted 
the Counting House. I could not conceive of it as an affair of 
yesterday. The partners and the clerks with whom I had for so 
many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, 
been closely associated — being suddenly removed from them — 
they seemed as dead to me. There is a fine passage, which 
may serve to illustrate this fancy, in a Tragedy by Sir Robert 
Howard, speaking of a friend's death : — 



'Twas but just now he went away ; 

I have not since had time to shed a tear ; 
And yet the distance does the same appear 
As if he had been a thousand years from me 
Time takes no measure in Eternity. 

To dissipate this awkward feeling, I have been fain to go 
among them once or twice since ; to visit my old desk-fellows — 
my co-brethren of the quill — that I had left below in the state 
militant. Not all the kindness with which they received me 
could quite restore to me that pleasant familiarity, which I had 
heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked some of our old 
jokes, but methought they went off but faintly. My old desk ; 
the peg where I hung my hat, were appropriated to another. I 

knew it must be, but I could not take it kindly. D 1 take me, 

if I did not feel some remorse — beast, if I had not — at quitting 
my old compeers, the faithful partners of my toil for six-and- 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 253 

thirty years, that smoothed for me with their jokes and conun- 
drums the ruggedness of my professional road. Had it been so 
rugged then, after all ? or was I a coward simply 1 Well, it is 
too late to repent ; and I also know that these suggestions are a 
common fallacy of the mind on such occasions. But my heart 
smote me. I had violently broken the bands betwixt us. It was 
at least not courteous. I shall be some time before I get quite 
reconciled to the separation. Farewell, old cronies, yet not for 
long, for again and again I will come among ye, if I shall have 

your leave. Farewell, Ch , dry, sarcastic, and friendly ! 

Do , mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly ! PI , officious 

to do, and to volunteer, good services ! — and thou, thou dreary 
pile, fit mansion for a Gresham or a Whittington of old, stately 
house of Merchants ; with thy labyrinthine passages, and light- 
excluding, pent-up offices, where candles for one-half the year 
supplied the place of the sun's light ; unhealthy contributor to 
my weal, stern fosterer of my living, farewell ! In thee remain, 
and not in the obscure collection of some wandering bookseller, 
my " works I" There let them rest, as I do from my labors, 
piled on thy massy shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever Aqui- 
nas left, and full as useful ! My mantle I bequeath among ye. 

A fortnight has passed since the date of my first communica- 
tion. At that period I was approaching to tranquillity, but had 
not reached it. I boasted of a calm indeed, but it was compara- 
tive only. Something of the first flutter was left ; an unsettling 
sense of novelty ; the dazzle to weak eyes of unaccustomed 
light. I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some 
necessary part of my apparel. I was a poor Carthusian, from 
strict cellular discipline suddenly by some revolution returned 
* upon the world. I am now as if I had never been other than my 
own master. It is natural to me to go where I please, to do what 
I please. I find myself at eleven o'clock in the day in Bond- 
street, and it seems to me that I have been sauntering there at 
that very hour for years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a 
book-stall. Methinks I have been thirty years a collector. There 
is nothing strange nor new in it. I find myself before a fine pic- 
ture in the morning. Was it ever otherwise ? What is become 
of Fish-street Hill ? Where is Fenchurch-street ? Stones of old 



254 ELIA. 

Mincing-lane, which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for 
six-and-thirty years, to the footsteps of what toil-worn clerk are 
your everlasting flints now vocal ? I indent the gayer flags of 
Pall Mall. It is 'Change time, and I am strangely among the 
Elgin marbles. It was no hyperbole when I ventured to com- 
pare the change in my condition to a passing into another world. 
Time stands still in a manner to me. I have lost all distinction 
of season. I do not know the day of the week or of the month. 
Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to 
the foreign post days ; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the 
next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday 
night's sensations. The genius of each day was upon me dis- 
tinctly during the whole of it, affecting my appetite, spirits, 
&c. The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to fol- 
low, sate as a load upon my poor Sabbath recreations. What 
charm has washed that Ethiop white ? What is gone of Black 
Monday 1 All days are the same. Sunday itself — that unfor- 
tunate failure of a holiday, as it too often proved, what with my 
sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quan- 
tity of pleasure out of it — is melted down into a week day. I 
can spare to go to church now, without grudging the huge cantle 
which it used to seem to cut out of the holiday. I have Time 
for everything. I can visit a sick friend. I can interrupt the 
man of much occupation when he is busiest. I can insult over 
him with an invitation to take a day's pleasure with me to Wind- 
sor this fine May-morning. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold 
the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking 
and caring ; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eter- 
nal round — and what is it all for ? A man can never have too 
much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I 
would christen him Nothing-to-do ; he should do nothing. Man, 
I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. 
I am altogether for the life contemplative. Will no kindly earth- 
quake come and swallow up those accursed cotton mills ? Take 
me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down 

As low as to the fiends, 
I am no longer * * * * * *, clerk to the Firm of, &c. I am 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. *M 

Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am 
already come to be known by my vacant face and careless ges- 
ture, perambulating at no fixed pace, nor with any settled pur- 
pose. I walk about ; not to and from. They tell me, a certain 
cum dignitate air, that has been buried so long with my other 
good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my person. I grow into 
gentility perceptibly. When I take up a newspaper, it is to read 
the state of the opera. Opus operatum est. I have done all 
that I came into this world to do. I have worked task-work 5 and 
have the rest of the day to myself. 



256 ELIA. 



THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 



It is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury, and Sir 
William Temple, are models of the genteel style in writing. 
We should prefer saying— of the lordly, and the gentlemanly. 
Nothing can be more unlike, than the inflated finical rhapsodies 
of Shaftesbury and the plain natural chit-chat of Temple. The 
man of rank is discernible in both writers ; but in the one it is 
only insinuated gracefully, in the other it stands out offensively. 
The peer seems to have written with his coronet on, and his Earl's 
mantle before him ; the commoner in his elbow-chair and un- 
dress. — What can be more pleasant than the way in which the 
retired statesman peeps out in his essays, penned by the latter in 
his delightful retreat at Shene ? They scent of Nimeguen, and 
the Hague. Scarce an authority is quoted under an ambassador. 
Don Francisco de Melo, a " Portugal Envoy in England," tells 
him it was frequent in his country for men, spent with age and 
other decays, so as they could not hope for above a year or two 
of life, to ship themselves away in a Brazil fleet, and after their 
arrival there to go on a great length, sometimes of twenty or 
thirty years, or more, by the force of that vigor they recovered 
with that remove.. " Whether such an effect (Temple beautifully 
adds) might grow from the air, or the fruits of that climate, or 
by approaching nearer the sun, which is the fountain of light 
and heat, when their natural heat was so far decayed : or whe- 
ther the piecing out of an old man's life were worth the pains ; I 
cannot tell : perhaps the play is not worth the candle." Mon- 
sieur Pompone, " French Ambassador in his (Sir William's) time 
at the Hague," certifies him, that in his life he had never heard 
of any man in France that arrived at a hundred years of age ; 
a limitation of life which the old gentleman imputes to the ex- 



THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 257 

cellence of their climate, giving them such a liveliness of temper 
and humor, as disposes them to more pleasures of all kinds than 
in other countries ; and moralises upon the matter very sensibly. 
The " late Robert Earl of Leicester" furnishes him with a story 
of a Countess of Desmond, married out of England in Edward 
the Fourth's time, and who lived far in King James's reign. The 
" same noble person " gives him an account, how such a year, 
in the same reign, there went about the country a set of morrice- 
dancers, composed of ten men who danced, a Maid Marian, 
and a tabor and pipe : and how these twelve, one with another, 
made up twelve hundred years. " It was not so much (says 
Temple) that so many in one small county (Hertfordshire) should 
lfve to that age, as that they should be in vigor and in humor to 
travel and to dance." Monsieur Zulichem, one of his " col- 
leagues at the Hague," informs him of a cure for the gout ; 
which is confirmed by another "Envoy," Monsieur Serinchamps, 
in that town, who had tried it. — Old Prince Maurice of Nassau 
recommends to him the use of hammocks in that complaint ; 
having been allured to sleep, while suffering under it himself, by 
the " constant motion or swinging of those airy beds." Count 
Egmont, and the Rhinegrave who " was killed last summer be- 
fore Maestricht," impart to him their experiences. 

But the rank of the writer is never more innocently disclosed 
than where he takes for granted the compliments paid by foreign- 
ers to his fruit-trees. For the taste and perfection of what we 
esteem the best, he can truly say, that the French, who have 
eaten his peaches and grapes at Shene in no very ill year, have 
generally concluded that the last are as good as any they have 
eaten in France on this side Fontainebleau ; and the first as good 
as any they have eaten in Gascony. Italians have agreed his white 
figs to be as good as any of that sort in Italy, which is the earlier 
kind of white fig there ; for in the later kind and the blue, we 
cannot come near the warm climates, no more than in the Fron- 
tignac or Muscat grape. His orange-trees, too, are as large as 
any he saw when he was young in France, except those of Fon- 
tainebleau ; or what he has seen since in the Low Countries, ex- 
cept some very old ones of the Prince of Orange's. Of grapes 
he had the honor of bringing over four sorts into England, which 
18 



258 ELIA. 

he enumerates, and supposes that they are all by this time pretty 
common among some gardeners in his neighborhood, as well as 
several persons of quality ; for he ever thought all things of this 
kind "the commoner they are made the better." The garden 
pedantry with which he asserts that 'tis to little purpose to plant 
any of the best fruits, as peaches or grapes, hardly, he doubts, 
beyond Northamptonshire at the furthest northwards ; and praises 
the " Bishop of Munster at Cosevelt," for attempting nothing be- 
yond cherries in that cold climate ; is equally pleasant and in 
character. " I may perhaps" (he thus ends his sweet Garden 
Essay with a passage worthy of Cowley) " be allowed to know 
something of this trade, since I have so long allowed myself to 
be good for nothing else, which few men will do, or enjoy their 
gardens, without often looking abroad to see how other matters 
play, what motions in the state, and what invitations they may 
hope for into other scenes. For my own part, as the country 
life, and this part of it more particularly, were the inclination of 
my youth itself, so they are the pleasure of my age ; and I can 
truly say that, among many great employments that have fallen 
to my share, I have never asked or sought for any of them, but 
have often endeavored to escape from them, into the ease and 
freedom of a private scene, where a man may go his own way 
and his own pace, in the common paths and circles of life. The 
measure of choosing well is whether a man likes what he has 
chosen, which, I thank God, has befallen me ; and though among 
the follies of my life, building and planting have not been the 
least, and have cost me more than I have the confidence to own ; 
yet they have been fully recompensed by the sweetness and satis- 
faction of this retreat, where, since my resolution taken of never 
entering again into any public employments, I have passed five 
years without ever once going to town, though I am almost in 
sight of it, and have a house there always ready to receive me. 
Nor has this been any sort of affectation, as some have thought 
it, but a mere want of desire or humor to make so small a re- 
move ; for when I am in this corner, I can truly say with Horace, 
Me quoties rejicit, fyc. 

" ' Me, when the cold Digentian stream revives, 
What does my friend believe I think or ask ? 



THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 259 

Let me yet less possess, so I may live, 
Whate'er of life remains, unto myself. 
May I have books enough ; and one year's store, 
Not to depend upon each doubtful hour : 
This is enough of mighty Jove to pray, 
Who, as be pleases, gives and takes away.' " 

The writings of Temple are, in general, after this easy copy. 
On one occasion, indeed, his wit, which was mostly subordinate 
to nature and tenderness, has seduced him into a string of felici- 
tous antitheses ; which, it is obvious to remark, have been a model 
to Addison and succeeding essayists. " Who would not be cove- 
tous, and with reason," he says, " if health could be purchased 
with gold ? who not ambitious, if it were at the command of 
power, or restored by honor ? but, alas ! a white staff will not 
help gouty feet to walk better than a common cane ; nor a blue 
riband bind up a wound so well as a fillet. The glitter of gold, 
or of diamonds, will but hurt sore eyes instead of curing them ; 
and an aching head will be no more eased by wearing a crown 
than a common night-cap." In a far better style, and more ac- 
cordant with his own humor of plainness, are the concluding 
sentences of his " Discourse upon Poetry." Temple took a part 
in the controversy about the ancient and the modern learning ; 
and, with that partiality so natural and so graceful in an old man, 
whose state engagements had left him little leisure to look into 
modern productions, while his retirement gave him occasion to 
look back upon the classic studies of his youth — decided in favor 
of the latter. " Certain it is," he says, " that, whether the 
fierceness of the Gothic humors, or noise of their perpetual wars, 
frighted it away, or that the unequal mixture of the modern lan- 
guages would not bear it — the great heights and excellency both 
of poetry and music fell with the Roman learning and empire, 
and have never since recovered the admiration and applauses that 
before attended them. Yet, such as they are amongst us, they 
must be confessed to be the softest and the sweetest, the most 
general and the most innocent amusements of common time and 
life. They still find room in the courts of princes, and the cot- 
tages of shepherds. They serve to revive and animate the dead 
calm of poor and idle lives, and to allay or divert the violent 



260 ELIA. 

passions and perturbations of the greatest and the busiest men. 
And both these effects are of equal use to human life ; for the 
mind of man is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the 
beholder nor the voyager, in a calm or in a storm, but is so to 
both when a little agitated by gentle gales ; and so the mind ; 
when moved by soft and easy passions or affections. I know very 
well that many who pretend to be wise by the forms of being 
grave, are apt to despise both poetry and music, as toys and trifles 
too light for the use or entertainment of serious men. But who- 
ever find themselves wholly insensible to their charms, would, I 
think, do well to keep their own counsel, for fear of reproach- 
ing their own temper, and bringing the goodness of their 
natures, if not of their understandings, into question. While 
this world lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure and request of these 
two entertainments will do so too ; and happy those that content 
themselves with these, or any other so easy and so innocent, and 
do not trouble the world or other men, because they cannot be 
quiet themselves, though nobody hurts them. 55 " When all is 
done (he concludes), human life is at the greatest and the best 
but like a froward child, that must be played with, and humored 
a little, to keep it quiet, till it falls asleep, and then the care is 
over," 



BARBARA S . 261 



BARBARA S- 



On the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or 4, 1 forget which it 

was, just as the clock had struck one, Barbara S , with her 

accustomed punctuality, ascended the long rambling staircase, 
with awkward interposed landing-places, which led to the office, 
or rather a sort of box with a desk in it, whereat sat the then 
Treasurer of (what few of our readers may remember) the Old 
Bath Theatre. All over the island it was the custom, and re- 
mains so I believe to this day, for the players to receive their 
weekly stipend on the Saturday. It was not much that Barbara 
had to claim. 

This little maid had just entered her eleventh year ; but her 
important station at the theatre, as it seemed to her, with the bene- 
fits which she felt to accrue from her pious application of her 
small earnings, had given an air of womanhood to her steps and 
to her behavior. You would have taken her to have been at least 
five years older. 

Till lately she had merely been employed in choruses, or where 
children were wanted to fill up the scene. But the manager, ob- 
serving a diligence and adroitness in her above her age, had for 
some few months past intrusted to her the performance of whole 
parts. You may guess the self-consequence of the promoted 
Barbara. She had already drawn tears in young Arthur ; had 
rallied Richard with infantine petulance in the Duke of York ; 
and in her turn had rebuked that petulance when she was Prince 
of Wales. She would have done the elder child in Morton's 
pathetic after-piece to the life ; but as yet the " Children in the 
Wood " was not. 

Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, I have 



262 ELIA. 

seen some of these small parts, each making two or three pages 
at most, copied out in the rudest hand of the then prompter, who 
doubtless transcribed a little more carefully and fairly for the 
grown-up tragedy ladies of the establishment. But such as they 
were, blotted and scrawled, as for a child's use, she kept them 
all ; and in the zenith of her after reputation it was a delightful 
sight to behold them bound up in costliest morocco, each single — 
each small part making a look — with fine clasps, gilt -splashed, 
&c. She had conscientiously kept them as they had been de- 
livered to her ; not a blot had been effaced or tampered with. 
They were precious to her for their affecting remembrancings. 
They were her principia, her rudiments ; the elementary atoms ; 
the little steps by which she pressed forward to perfection. 
" What,' 5 she would say, " could Indian-rubber, or a pumice-stone 
have done for these darlings !" 

I am in no hurry to begin my story — indeed I have little or 
none to tell — so I will just mention an observation of hers con- 
nected with that interesting time. 

Not long before she died I had been discoursing with her on the 
quantity of real present emotion which a great tragic performer 
experiences during acting. I ventured to think, that though in 
the first instance such players must have possessed the feelings 
which they so powerfully called up in others, yet by frequent re- 
petition those feelings must become deadened in great measure, 
and the performer trust to the memory of past emotion, rather 
than express a present one. She indignantly repelled the notion, 
that with a truly great tragedian the operation, by which such 
effects were produced upon an audience, could ever degrade itself 
into what was purely mechanical. With much delicacy, avoid- 
ing to instance in her seZf-experience, she told me, that so long 
ago as when she used to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. 
Porter's Isabella (I think it was), when that impressive actress 
has been bending over her in some heart-rending colloquy, she 
has felt real hot tears come trickling from her, which (to use her 
powerful expression) have perfectly scalded her back. 

I am not quite sure that it was Mrs. Porter ; but it was some 
great actress of that day. The name is indifferent \ but the fact 
of the scalding tears I most distinctly remember. 



BARBARA S 263 

I was always fond of the society of players, and am not sure 
that an impediment in my speech (which certainly kept me out 
of the pulpit) even more than certain personal disqualifications, 
which are often got over in that profession, did not prevent me at 
one time of life from adopting it. I have had the honor (I must 
ever call it) once to have been admitted to the tea-table of Miss 
Kelly. I have played at serious whist with Mr. Liston. I have 
chatted with ever good-humored Mrs. Charles Kemble. I have 
conversed as friend to friend with her accomplished husband. I 
have been indulged with a classical conference with Macready ; 
and with a sight of the Player-picture gallery, at Mr. Mathews's, 
when the kind owner, to remunerate me for my love of the old 
actors (whom he loves so much), went over it with me, supplying 
to his capital collection, what alone the artist could not give them 
— voice ; and their living motion. Old tones, half- faded, of Dodd, 
and Parsons, and Baddeley, have lived again for me at his bid- 
ding. Only Edwin he could not restore to me. I have supped 
with ; but I am growling a coxcomb. 

As I was about to say — at the desk of the then treasurer of the 
old Bath theatre — not Diamond's — presented herself the little Bar- 
bara S . 

The parents of Barbara had been in reputable circumstances. 
The father had practised, I believe, as an apothecary in the town. 
But his practice, from causes which I feel my own infirmity too 
sensibly that way to arraign — or perhaps from that pure infelicity 
which accompanies some people in their walk through life, and 
which it is impossible to lay at the door of imprudence — was now 
reduced to nothing. They were in fact in the very teeth of 
starvation, when the manager, who knew and respected them in 
better days, took the little Barbara into his company. 

At the period I commenced with, her slender earnings were the 
sole support of the family, including two younger sisters. I must 
throw a veil over some mortifying circumstances. Enough to 
say, that her Saturday's pittance was the only chance of a Sun- 
day's (generally their only) meal of meat. 

One thing I will only mention, that in some child's part, where 
in her theatrical character she was to sup off a roast fowl (O joy 
to Barbara !} some comic actor, who was for the night caterer 



264 ELIA. 

for this dainty — in the misguided humor of his part, threw over 
the dish such a quantity of salt (O grief and pain of heart to Bar- 
bara !) that when she crammed a portion of it into her mouth, 
she was obliged sputteringly to reject it ; and what with shame 
of her ill-acted part, and pain of real appetite at missing such a 
dainty, her little heart sobbed almost to breaking, till a flood of 
tears, which the well-fed spectators were totally unable to com- 
prehend, mercifully relieved her. 

This was the little, starved, meritorious maid, who stood before 
old Ravenscroft, the treasurer, for her Saturday's payment. 

Ravenscroft was a man, I have heard many old theatrical peo- 
ple besides herself say, of all men least calculated for a treasurer 
He had no head for accounts, paid away at random, kept scarce 
any books, and summing up at the week's end, if he found him- 
self a pound or so deficient, blest himself that it was no worse. 

Now Barbara's weekly stipend was a bare half guinea. — By 
mistake he popped into her hand — a whole one. 
Barbara tripped away. 

She was entirely unconscious at first of the mistake : God 
knows, Ravenscroft would never have discovered it. 

But when she had got down to the first of those uncouth land- 
ing-places, she became sensible of an unusual weight of metal 
pressing her little hand. 
Now mark the dilemma. 

She was by nature a good child. From her parents and those 
about her she had imbibed no contrary influence. But then they 
. had taught her nothing. Poor men's smoky cabins are not always 
porticoes of moral philosophy. This little maid had no instinct 
to evil, but then she might be said to have no fixed principle. 
She had heard honesty commended, but never dreamed of its ap- 
plication to herself. She thought of it as something which con- 
cerned grown-up people, men and women. She had never known 
temptation, or thought of preparing resistance against it. 

Her first impulse was to go back to the old treasurer, and ex- 
plain to him his blunder. . He was already so confused with age, 
besides a natural want of punctuality, that she would have had 
some difficulty in making him understand it. She saw that in an 
instant. And then it was such a bit of money ! and then the 



BARBARA S . 265 

image of a larger allowance of butcher 's-meat on their table next 
day came across her, till her little eyes glistened, and her mouth 
moistened. But then Mr. Ravenscroft had always been so good- 
natured, had stood her friend behind the scenes, and even recom- 
mended her promotion to some of her little parts. But again the 
old man was reputed to be worth a world of money. He was 
supposed to have fifty pounds a year clear of the theatre. And 
then came staring upon her the figures of her little stockingless 
and shoeless sisters. And when she looked at her own neat white 
cotton stockings, which her situation at the theatre had made it 
indispensable for her mother to provide for her, with hard strain- 
ing and pinching from the family stock, and thought how glad 
she should be to cover their poor feet with the same — and how 
then they could accompany her to rehearsals, which they had 
hitherto been precluded from doing, by reason of their unfashiona- 
ble attire, — in these thoughts she reached the second landing- 
place — the second, I mean, from the top — for there was still ano- 
ther left to traverse. 

Now virtue support Barbara ! 

And that never- failing friend did step m — for at that moment a 
strength not her own, I have heard her say, was revealed to her 
— a reason above reasoning — and without her own agency, as it 
seemed (for she never felt her feet to move) she found herself 
transported back to the individual desk she had just quitted, and 
her hand in the old hand of Ravenscroft, who in silence took back 
the refunded treasure, and who had been sitting (good man) in- 
sensible to the lapse of minutes, which to her were anxious ages, 
and from that moment a dead peace fell upon her heart, and she 
knew the quality of honesty. 

A year or two's unrepining application to her profession bright- 
ened up the feet, and the prospects, of her little sisters, set the 
whole family upon their legs again, and released her from the 
difficulty of discussing moral dogmas upon a landing-place. 

I have heard her say, that it was a surprise, not much short of 
mortification to her, to see the coolness with which the old man 
pocketed the difference, which had caused her such mortal throes. 

This anecdote of herself I had in the year 1800, from the mouth 



266 ELIA. 

of the late Mrs. Crawford,* then sixty-seven years of age (she 
died soon after) ; and to her struggles upon this childish occasion 
I have sometimes ventured to think her indebted for that power of 
rending the heart in the representation of conflicting emotions, for 
which in after years she was considered as little inferior (if at all 
so in the part of Lady Randolph) even to Mrs. Siddons. 

* The maiden name of this lady was Street, which she changed by suc- 
cessive marriages, for those of Dancer, Barry, and Crawford. She was Mrs. 
Crawford, a third time a widow, when I knew her. 



THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 267 



THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 

IN A LETTER TO R S , ESQ. 



Though in some points of doctrine, and perhaps of discipline, I 
am diffident of lending a perfect assent to that church which you 
have so worthily historified, yet may the ill time never come to 
me, when with a chilled heart or a portion of irreverent senti- 
ment, I shall enter her beautiful and time-hallowed Edifices. 
Judge then of my mortification when, after attending the choral 
anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous 
of renewing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, with the tombs 
and antiquities there, I found myself excluded ; turned out like a 
dog, or some profane person, into the common street, with feel- 
ings not very congenial to the place, or to the solemn service 
which I had been listening to. It was a jar after that music. 

You had your education at Westminster ; and doubtless among 
those dim aisles and cloisters, you must have gathered much of 
that devotional feeling in those young years, on which your purest 
mind feeds still — and may it feed ! The antiquarian spirit, 
strong in you, and gracefully blending ever with the religious, 
may have been sown in you among those wrecks of splendid 
mortality. You owe it to the place of your education ; you owe 
it to your learned fondness for the architecture of your ancestors ; 
you owe it to the venerableness of your ecclesiastical establish- 
ment, which is daily lessened and called in question through these 
practices — to speak aloud your sense of them ; never to desist 
raising your voice against them, till they be totally done away 
with and abolished ; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no 
longer closed against the decent, though low-in-purse, enthusiast, 



268 ELIA. 

or blameless devotee, who must commit an injury against his 
family economy, if he would be indulged with a bare admission 
within its walls. You owe it to the decencies, which you wish to 
see maintained, in its impressive services, that our Cathedral be 
no longer an object of inspection to the poor at those times only, 
in which they must rob from their attendance on the worship 
every minute which they can bestow upon the fabric. In vain 
the public prints have taken up this subject, in vain such poor 
nameless writers as myself express their indignation. A word 
from you, Sir — a hint in your Journal — would be sufficient to 
fling open the doors of the Beautiful Temple again, as we can re- 
member them when we were boys. At that time of life, what 
would the imaginative faculty (such as it is) in both of us, have 
suffered, if the entrance to so much reflection had been obstructed 
by the demand of so much silver ! — If we had scraped it up to 
gain an occasional admission (as we certainly should have done) 
would the sight of those old tombs have been as impressive to us 
(while we have been weighing anxiously prudence against senti- 
ment) as when the gates stood open as those of the adjacent Park ; 
when we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a 
shorter or longer time, as that lasted ? Is the being shown over 
a place the same as silently for ourselves detecting the genius of 
it ? In no part of our beloved Abbey now can a person find 
entrance (out of service time) under the sum of two shillings. 
The rich and the great will smile at the anticlimax, presumed to 
lie in these two short words. But you can tell them, Sir, how 
much quiet worth, how much capacity for enlarged feeling, how 
much taste and genius, may coexist, especially in youth, with a 
purse incompetent to this demand. — A respected friend of ours, 
during his late visit to the metropolis, presented himself for ad- 
mission to St. Paul's. At the same time a decently clothed man, 
with as decent a wife, and child, were bargaining for the same 
indulgence. The price was only two-pence each person. The 
poor but decent man hesitated, desirous to go in ; but there were 
three of them, and he turned away reluctantly. Perhaps he 
wished to have seen the tomb of Nelson. Perhaps the Interior of 
the Cathedral was his object. But in the state of his finances, 
even sixpence might reasonably seem too much. Tell the Aris- 



THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 269 

tocracy of the country (no man can do it more impressivery) ; 
instruct them of what value these insignificant pieces of money, 
these minims to their sight, may be to their humbler brethren. 
Shame these Sellers out of the Temple. Stifle not the suggestions 
of your better nature with the pretext, that an indiscriminate ad- 
mission would expose the Tombs to violation. Remember your 
boy-days. Did you ever see, or hear, of a mob in the Abbey 
while it was free to all 1 Do the rabble come there, or trouble 
their heads about such speculations 1 It is all that you can do to 
drive them into your churches ; they do not voluntarily offer 
themselves. They have, alas ! no passion for antiquities ; for 
tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they would 
be no longer the rabble. 

For forty years that I have known the Fabric, the only well- 
attested charge of violation adduced, has been — a ridiculous dis- 
memberment committed upon the effigy of that amiable spy, 
Major Andre. And is it for this — the wanton mischief of some 
school-boy, fired perhaps with raw notions of Transatlantic Free- 
dom—or the remote possibility of such a mischief occurring 
again, so easily to be prevented by stationing a constable within 
the walls, if the vergers are incompetent to the duty — is it upon 
such wretched pretences, that the people of England are made to 
pay a new Peter's Pence so long abrogated ; or must content 
themselves with contemplating the ragged Exterior of their Cathe- 
dral ? The mischief was done about the time that you were a 
scholar there. Do you know anything about the unfortunate 
relic ? 



2*70 ELIA. 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 



Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep 
Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas ? 

I do not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation, than 
on seeing my old friend G. D., who had been paying me a morn- 
ing visit a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon 
taking leave, instead of turning down the right-hand path by 
which he had entered — with staff in hand, and at noon-day deli- 
berately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that 
runs by us, and totally disappear. 

A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling enough ; 
but in the broad open daylight, to witness such an unreserved 
motion towards self-destruction in a valued friend, took from me 
all power of speculation. 

How I found my feet, I know not. Consciousness was quite 
gone. Some spirit, not my own, whirled me to the spot. I re- 
member nothing but the silvery apparition of a good white head 
emerging ; nigh which a staff (the hand unseen that wielded it) 
pointed upwards, as feeling for the skies. In a moment (if time 
was in that time) he was on my shoulders, and I — freighted with a 
load more precious than his who bore Anchises. 

And here I cannot but do justice to the officious zeal of sundry 
passers by, who, albeit arriving a little too late to participate in 
the honors of the rescue, in philanthropic shoals came thronging 
to communicate their advice as to the recovery ; prescribing va- 
riously the application, or non-application, of salt, &c, to the 
person of the patient. Life meantime was ebbing fast away, 
amidst the stifle of conflicting judgments, when one, more saga- 
cious than the rest, by a bright thought, proposed sending for the 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS 211 

Doctor. Trite as the counsel was, and impossible, as one should 
think, to be missed on, — shall T confess ? — in this emergency it 
was to me as if an Angel had spoken. Great previous exertions 
— and mine had not been inconsiderable — are commonly followed 
by a debility of purpose. This was a moment of irresolution. 

Monoculus — for so, in default of catching his true name, I 
choose to designate the medical gentleman who now appeared — is 
a grave, middle-aged person, who, without having studied at the 
college, or truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath employed 
a great portion of his valuable time in experimental processes 
upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital 
spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct, and lost for 
ever. He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a 
case of common surfeit suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, 
sometimes induced by a too wilful application of the plant canna- 
bis outwardly. But though he declineth not altogether these drier 
extinctions, his occupation tendeth, for the most part, to water- 
practice ; for the convenience of which, he hath judiciously fixed 
his quarters near the grand repository of the stream mentioned, 
where day and night, from his little watch-tower, at the Middle- 
ton's Head, he listeneth to detect the wrecks of drowned mortality 
— partly, as he saith, to be upon the spot — and partly, because 
the liquids which he useth to prescribe to himself, and his patients, 
on these distressing occasions, are ordinarily more conveniently to 
be found at these common hostelries than in the shops and phials 
of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived to such finesse by 
practice, that it is reported he can distinguish a plunge, at a half 
furlong distance ; and can tell if it be casual or deliberate. He 
weareth a medal suspended over a suit, originally of a sad brown, 
but which, by time and frequency of nightly divings, has been 
dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name 
of Doctor, and is remarkable for wanting his left eye. His rem- 
edy — after a sufficient application of warm blankets, friction, &c, 
is a simple tumbler or more, of the purest Cognac, with water, 
made as hot as the convalescent can bear it. Where he findeth, 
as in the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he condescend- 
ed to be the taster ; and showeth, by his own example, the in- 
nocuous nature of the prescription. Nothing can be more kind 



272 ELTA. 

or encouraging than this procedure. It addeth confidence to the 
patient, to see his medical adviser go hand in hand with himself 
in the remedy. When the doctor swalloweth his own draught, 
what peevish invalid can refuse to pledge him in the potion ? In 
fine, Monoculus is a humane, sensible man, who, for a slender 
pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, is content to wear it out in 
the endeavor to save the lives of others — his pretensions so mode- 
rate, that with difficulty I could press a crown upon him, for the 
price of restoring the existence of such an invaluable creature to 
society as G. D. 

It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm up- 
on the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed to have given a 
shake to memory, calling up notice after notice, of all the provi- 
dential deliverances he had experienced in the course of his long 
and innocent life. Sitting up in my couch — my couch which 
naked and void of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which 
it administered, shall be honored with costly valance, at some 
price, and henceforth be a state-bed at Colebrook, — he discoursed 
of marvellous escapes — by carelessness of nurses — by pails of 
gelid, and kettles of the boiling element, in infancy — by orchard 
pranks, and snapping twigs, in schoolboy frolics — by descent of 
tiles at Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke — by 
studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance — by want, and 
the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings of the learned head. 
Anon, he would burst out into little fragments of chanting — of 
songs long ago — ends of deliverance hymns, not remembered before 
since childhood, but coming up now, when his heart was made 
tender as a child's — for the tremor cordis, in the retrospect of a 
recent deliverance, as in a case of impending danger, acting 
upon an innocent heart, will produce a self- tenderness, which we 
should do ill to christen cowardice ; and Shakspeare, in the latter 
crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by 
Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers. 

Waters of 'Sir Hugh Middleton — what a spark you were like to 
have extinguished for ever ! Your salubrious streams to this City, 
for now nearly two centuries, would hardly have atoned for what 
you were in a moment washing away. Mockery of a river — 
liquid artifice — wretched conduit ! henceforth rank with canals, 



AMICUS RED1VIVUS. 273 

and sluggish aqueducts. Was it for this, that, smit in boyhood 
with the exploration of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales 
of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace your salu- 
tary waters sparkling through green Hertfordshire, and cultured 
Enfield parks ? — Ye have no swans — no Naiads — no river God — 
or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck 
him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your 
waters ? 

Had he been drowned in Cam, there would have been some 
consonancy in it ; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle 
over his moist sepulture ? — or, having no name, besides that un- 
meaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye think to get one 
by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the Stream 
Dyerian ? 

And could such spacious virtue find a grave 
Beneath the imposthumed bubble of a wave ? 

I protest, George, you shall not venture out again — no, not 
by daylight — without a sufficient pair of spectacles — in your 
musing moods especially. Your absence of mind we have borne, 
till your presence of body came to be called in question by it. 
You shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we can 
help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years, after your many 
tracts in favor of sprinkling only ! 

I have nothing but water in my Jaead o'nights since this fright- 
ful accident. Sometimes I am with Clarence in his dream. 
At others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, and crying out to 
his good brother Hopeful (that is, to me), " I sink in deep waters ; 
the billows go over my head, all the waves go over me. Selah." 
Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I 
cry out too late to save. Next follow — a mournful procession — 
suicidal faces, saved against their wills from drowning ; dolefully 
trailing a length of reluctant gratefulness, with ropy weeds pen- 
dent from locks of watchet hue — constrained Lazari — Pluto's 
half-subjects — stolen fees from the grave — bilking Charon of his 
fare. At their head Arion — or is it G. D.? — in his singing gar- 
ments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, 
which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to 
19 



274 ELIA. 

suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal streams 
of Lethe, in which the half drenche 1 on earth are constrained to 
drown downright, by wharfs where Ophelia twice acts her muddy 
death. 

And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world, 
when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their 
inexorable precincts. When a soul knocks once, twice, at death's 
door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be considera- 
ble ; and the grim Feature, by modern science so often dispos- 
sessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity Tan- 
talus. 

A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, 
when the near arrival of G. D. was announced by no equivocal 
indications. From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and 
the graver ghosts — poet, or historian — of Grecian or of Roman 
lore — to crown with unfading chaplets the half-finished love-la- 
bors of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected — him 
Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter — him the sweet lyrist of Peter 
House, whom he had barely seen upon earth,* with newest 

airs prepared to greet ; and patron of the gentle Christ's 

boy, — who should have been his patron through life — the mild 
Askew, with longing aspirations leaned foremost from his vene- 
rable iEsculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the 
matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he 
himself upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered. 

* Graitjm tantum vidit 



SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 275 



SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 



Sydney's Sonnets — I speak of the best of them— are among the 
very best of their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, 
the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton, 
in his compositions of a similar structure. They are in truth 
what Milton, censuring the Arcadia, says of that work (to which 
they are a sort of after-tune or application), " vain and amatori- 
ous " enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be 
true of the romance) may be " full of worth and wit." They 
savor of the Courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the Common- 
wealthsman. But Milton was a Courtier when he wrote the 
Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a Courtier when he 
composed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to begin, 
he becomingly cast these vanities behind him ; and if the order of 
time had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the 
Revolution, there is no reason why he should not have acted the 
same part in that emergency, which has glorified the name of a 
later Sydney. He did not want for plainness or boldness of spirit. 
His letter on the French match may testify he could speak his 
mind freely to Princes. The times did not call him to the 
scaffold. 

The Sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton were the 
composition of his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am 
about to produce, were written in the very hey-day of his blood. 
They are stuck full of amorous fancies — far-fetched conceits, 
befitting his occupation : for True Love thinks no labor to send 
out Thoughts upon the vast, and more than Indian voyages, to 
bring home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, 
to sacrifice in self-depreciating similitudes, as shadows of true 



2?6 ELIA 

amiabilities in the Beloved. We must be Lovers — or at least the 
cooling touch of time, the circum prcEcordia frigus must not have 
so damped our faculties, as to take away our recollection that we 
were once so — before we can duly appreciate the glorious vanities 
and graceful hyperboles of the passion. The images which lie 
before our feet (though by some accounted the only natural) are 
least natural for the high Sydnean love to express its fancies 
by. They may serve for the loves of Tibullus, or the dear Au- 
thor of the Schoolmistress ; for passions that creep and whine in 
Elegies and Pastoral Ballads. I am sure Milton never loved at 
this rate. I am afraid some of his addresses ( ad Leonoram, I 
mean) have rather erred on the farther side ; and that the poet 
came not much short of a religious indecorum, when he could 
thus apostrophise a singing girl : — 

Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes) 

Obtigit aetheriis ales ab ordinibus. 
Quid mirum, Leonora, tibi si gloria major, 

Nam tua praesentem vox sonat ipsa Deum ? 
Aut Deus, aut vacui certe mens tertia coeli, 

Per tua secreto guttura serpit agens ; 
Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda 

Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono. 
Quod si ctjncta quidem Deus est, per cunctaque fusus, 
In te una loquitur, C-setera mutus habet. 

This is loving in a strange fashion : and it requires some can- 
dor of construction (besides the slight darkening of a dead lan- 
guage) to cast a veil over the ugly appearance of something very 
like blasphemy in the last two verses. I think the Lover would 
have been staggered, if he had gone about to express the same 
thought in English. I am sure, Sydney has no flights like this. 
His extravaganzas do not strike at the sky, though he takes leave 
to adopt the pale Dian into a fellowship with his mortal passions. 



With how sad steps, Moon, thou climb'st the skies ; 
How silently, and with how wan a face ! 
What ! may it be, that even in heavenly place 
That busy Archer his sharp arrows tries ? 
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes 



SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 211 

Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case ; 
I read it in thy looks ; thy languish t grace 
To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. 
Then, even of fellowship, Moon, tell me, 
Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit ? 
Are beauties there as proud as here they be ? 
Do they above love to be loved, and yet 
Those lovers scorn, whom that love doth possess ? 
Do they call virtue there — ungratefulness I 

The last line of this poem is a little obscured by transposition. 
He means, Do they call ungratefulness there a virtue ? 

ii. 

Come, Sleep, Sleep, the certain knot of peace, 
The baiting place of wit, the balm of wo, 
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, 
The indifferent judge between the high and low ; 
With shield of proof shield me from out the prease* 
Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw ; 

make in me those civil wars to cease : 

1 will good tribute pay, if thou do so. 

Take thou of me sweet pillows, sweetest bed, 
A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; 
A rosy garland, and a weary head. 
And if these things, as being thine by right, 
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me, 
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see. 

N 
III. 

The curious wits, seeing dull pensiveness 
Bewray itself in my long-settled eyes, 
Whence those same fumes of melancholy rise, 
With idle pains, and missing aim, do guess. 
Some that know how my spring I did address, 
Deem that my Muse some fruit of knowledge plies ; 
Others, because the Prince my service tries, 
Think, that I think state errors to redress ; 
But harder judges judge, ambition's rage, 
Scourge of itself, still climbing slippery place, 
Holds my young brain captived in golden cage, 
fools, or over- wise ! alas, the race 
Of all my thoughts hath neither stop nor start, 
But only Stella's eyes and Stella's heart. 

* Press. 



278 EL1A. 

IV. 

Because I oft in dark abstracted guise 

Seem most alone in greatest company, 

With dearth of words, or answers quite awry, 

To them that would make speech of speech arise ; 

They deem, and of their doom the rumor flies, 

That poison foul of bubbling Pride doth lie 

So in my swelling breast, that only I 

Fawn on myself, and others do despise ; 

Yet Pride, I think, doth not my soul possess, 

Which looks too oft in his unflattering glass ; 

But one worse fault — Ambition — I confess, 

That makes me oft my best friends overpass, 

Unseen, unheard — while Thought to highest place 

Bends all his powers, even unto Stella's grace. 



Having this day, my horse, my hand, my lance, 
Guided so well that I obtained the prize, 
Both by the judgment of the English eyes, 
And of some sent from that sweet enemy — France ; 
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance, 
Townsfolk my strength ; a daintier judge applies 
His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise : 
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance ; 
Others, because of both sides I do take 
My blood from them, who did excel in this, 
Think Nature me a man of arms did make. 
How far they shot awry ! the true cause is, 
Stella looked on, and from her heavenly face 
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race 

VI. 

In martial sports I had my cunning tried 
And yet to break more staves did me address. 
While with the people's shouts (I must confess) 
Youth, luck, and praise, even fill'd my veins with pride- 
When Cupid having me (his slave) descried 
In Mars' livery, prancing in the press, 
" What now, Sir Fool !" said he : "I would no less : 
Look here, I say." I look'd, and Stella spied, 
Who hard by made a window send forth light. 
My heart then quaked, then dazzled were mine eyes : 
One hand forgot to rule, th' other to fight ; 
Nor trumpet's sound I heard, nor friendly cries, 
My foe came on, and beat the air for me — 
Till that her blush made me my shame to see 



SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 279 

VII. 

No more, my dear, no more these counsels try ; 

give my passions leave to run their race ; 
Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace ; 
Let folk o'ercharged with brain against me cry : 
Let clouds bedim my face, break in mine eye ; 
Let me no steps, but of lost labor trace ; 

Let all the earth with scorn recount my case — 
But do not will me from my love to fly. 

1 do not envy Aristotle's wit, 

Nor do aspire to Caesar's bleeding fame ; 
Nor aught do care though some above me sit, 
Nor hope, nor wish, another course to frame : 
But that which once may win thy cruel heart, 
Thou art my wit, and thou my virtue art. 

VIII. 

Love still a boy, and oft a wanton, is, 

School'd only by his mother's tender eye ; 

What wonder then, if he his lesson miss, 

When for so soft a rod dear play he try ? 

And yet my Star, because a sugar'd kiss 

In sport I suck'd, while she asleep did lie, 

Doth lour, nay chide, nay threat, for only this. 

Sweet, it was saucy Love, not humble I. 

But no 'scuse serves ; she makes her wrath appear 

In beauty's throne — see now who dares come near 

Those scarlet judges, threat'ning bloody pain ? 

heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss -worthy face 
Anger invests with such a lovely grace, 
That anger's self I needs must kiss again. 

IX. 

1 never drank of Aganippe well, 
Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit, 

And Muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell ; 

Poor layman I, for sacred rites unfit. 

Some do I hear of Poet's fury tell, 

But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it ; 

And this I swear by blackest brook of hell, 

I am no pick-purse of another's wit. 

How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease 

My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow 

In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please ? 

Guess me the cause — what is it thus ? — fye, no. 

Or so ? — much less. How then ? sure thus it is, 

My lips are sweet, inspired with Stella's kiss. 



280 ELIA. 

x. 

Of all the kings that ever here did reign, 
Edward, named Fourth, as first in praise I name, 
Not for his fair outside, nor well-lined brain — 
Although less gifts imp feathers oft on Fame. 
Nor that he could, young-wise, wise-valiant, frame 
His sire's revenge, join 5 d with a kingdom's gain; 
And, gain'd by Mars could yet mad Mars so tame* 
That Balance weigh'd what Sword did late obtain 
Nor that he made the Floure-de-luce so 'fraid, 
Though strongly hedged of bloody Lions' paws 
That witty Lewis to him a tribute paid. 
Nor this, nor that, nor any such small cause — 
But only, for this worthy knight durst prove 
To lose his crown rather than fall his love. 

XI. 

happy Thames, that didst my Stella bear, 

1 saw thyself, with many a smiling line 
Upon thy cheerful face, Joy's livery wear, 
While those fair planets on thy streams did shine 
The boat for joy could not to dance forbear, 
While wanton winds, with beauty so divine 
Rarish'd, stay'd not, till in her golden hair 
They did themselves (0 sweetest prison) twine, 
And fain those JEol's youth there would they stay 
Have made ; but, forced by nature still to fly, 
First did with puffing kiss those locks display. 
She, so dishevell'd, blush'd ; from window I 
With sight thereof cried out, O fair disgrace, 

Let honor's self to thee grant highest place ! 

XII. 

Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be ; 
And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet, 
Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet, 
More soft than to a chamber melody ; 
Now blessed You bear onward blessed Me 
To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet, 
My Muse and I must you of duty greet 
With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully, 
Be you still fair, honor' d by public heed, 
By no encroachment wrong' d and time forgot; 
Nor blamed for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed . 
And that you know, I envy you no lot 
Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss 
Hundreds of years you Stella's feet may kiss. 



SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 281 

Of the foregoing, the first, the second, and the last sonnet, are 
my favorites. But the general beauty of them all is, that they 
are so perfectly characteristical. The spirit of " learning and of 
chivalry," — of which union, Spenser has entitled Sydney to have 
been the "president," — shines through them. I confess I can 
see nothing of the "jejune" or "frigid" in them; much less 
of the " stiff" and " cumbrous " — which I have sometimes heard 
objected to the Arcadia. The verse runs off swiftly and gallantly. 
It might have been tuned to the trumpet ; or tempered (as him- 
self expressed it) to " trampling horses' feet." They abound in 
felicitous phrases — 

O heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face — 

8th Sonnet. 



■ Sweet pillows, sweetest bed ; 



A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light; 
A rosy garland, and a weary head. 

2d Sonnet. 



That sweet enemy,— France— 

5th Sonnet. 

But they are not rich in words only in vague and unlocalised 
feelings — the failing too much of some poetry of the present day 
— they are full, material, and circumstantiated. Time and place 
appropriates every one of them. It is not a fever of passion 
wasting itself upon a thin diet of dainty words, but a transcendant 
passion pervading and illuminating action, pursuits, studies, feats 
of arms, the opinions of contemporaries and his judgment of 
them. An historical thread runs through them, which almost 
affixes a date to them ; marks the when and where they were 
written. 

I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the merit of these 
poems, because I have been hurt by the wantonness (I wish I 
could treat it by a gentler name) with which W. H. takes every 
occasion of insulting the memory of Sir Philip Sydney. But the 
decisions of the Author of Table Talk, &c. (most profound and 
subtle where they are, as for the most part, just), are more safely 
to be relied upon, on subjects and authors ^e has a partiality for, 
than on such as he has conceived an accidental prejudice against. 



282 ELIA. 

Milton wrote Sonnets, and was a king-hater ; and it was conge- 
nial perhaps to sacrifice a courtier to a patriot. But I was un- 
willing to lose a fine idea from my mind. The noble images, 
passions, sentiments, and poetical delicacies of character, scattered 
all over the Arcadia (spite of some stiffness and encumberment), 
justify to me the character which his contemporaries have left 
us of the writer. I cannot think with the Critic, that Sir Philip 
Sydney was that opprobrious tMng which a foolish nobleman in his 
insolent hostility chose to term him. I call to mind the epitaph 
made on him, to guide me to juster thoughts of him ; and I re- 
pose upon the beautiful lines in the " Friend's Passion for his 
Astrophel," printed with the Elegies of Spenser and others. 

You knew— who knew not Astrophel ? 
(That I should live to say I knew, 
And have not in possession still !) 
Things known permit me to renew — 

Of him you know his merit such, 

I cannot say— you hear — too much. 

Within these woods of Arcady 
He chief delight and pleasure took ; 
And on the mountain Partheny, 
Upon the crystal liquid brook, 

The Muses met him every day, 

That taught him sing, to write, and say. 

When he descended down the mount* 
His personage seemed most divine : 
A thousand graces one might count 
Upon his lovely cheerful eyne. 

To hear him speak, and sweetly smile, 

You were in Paradise the while. 

A sweet attractive kind of grace : 
A full assurance given by looks ; 
Continual comfort in a face, 
The lineaments of Gospel books — 

I trow that count'nance cannot lye, 

Whose thoughts are legible in the eye. 



Above all others this is he, 
Which erst approved in his song, 



SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY 283 

That love and honor might agree, 
And that pure love will do no wrong. 
Sweet saints, it is no sin or blame 

To love a man of virtuous name. 

/■ 

* Did never love so sweetly breathe 
In any mortal breast before : 
Did never Muse inspire beneath 
A Poet's brain with finer store. 

He wrote of Love with high conceit, 

And Beauty rear'd above her height. 

Or let any one read the deeper sorrows (grief running into 
rage) in the Poem, — the last in the collection accompanying the 
above, — which from internal testimony I believe to be Lord 
Brooke's, — beginning with "Silence augmenteth grief/ 5 — and 
then seriously ask himself, whether the subject of such absorbing 
and confounding regrets could have been that thing which Lord 
Oxford termed him. 



284 ELIA. 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 



Dan Stuart once told us, that he did not remember that he ever 
deliberately walked into the Exhibition at Somerset House in his 
life. He might occasionally have escorted a party of ladies 
across the way that were going in ; bujt he never went in of his 
own head. Yet the office of the Morning Post newspaper stood 
then just where it does now — we are carrying you back, Reader, 
some thirty years or more — with its gilt-globe-topt front facing 
that emporium of our artists' grand Annual Exposure. We 
sometimes wish, that we had observed the same abstinence with 
Daniel. 

A word or two of D. S. He ever appeared to us one of the 
finest-tempered of Editors. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, was 
equally pleasant, with a dash, no slight one either, of the courtier. 
S. was frank, plain, and English all over. We have worked for 
both these gentlemen. 

It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges ; to trace 
the first little bubblings of a mighty river ; 

With holy reverence to approach the rocks, 
Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song. 

Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim's exploratory 
ramblings after the cradle of the infant Nilus, we well remember 
on one fine summer holiday (a " whole day's leave" we called 
it at Christ's hospital) sallying forth at rise of sun, not very w T ell 
provisioned either for such an undertaking, to trace the current 
of the New River — Middletonian strea'm ! — to its scaturient 
source, as we had read, in meadows by fair Amwell. Gallantly 
did we commence our solitary quest — for it was essential to the 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEA RS AGO. 285 

dignity of a Discovery, that no eye of schoolboy, save our own, 
should beam on the detection. By flowery spots, and verdant 
lanes skirting Hornsey, Hope trained us on in many a baffling 
turn; endless, hopeless meanders, as it seemed; or as if the 
jealous waters had dodged us, reluctant to have the humble spot 
of their nativity revealed; till spent, and nigh famished before set 
of the same sun, w r e sate down somewhere by Bowes Farm near 
Tottenham, with a tithe of our proposed labors only yet accom- 
plished ; sorely convinced in spirit, that that Brucian enterprise 
was as yet too arduous for our young shoulders. 

Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller is 
the tracing of some mighty waters up to their shallow fontlet, 
than it is to a pleased and candid reader to go back to the inex- 
perienced essays, the first callow flights in authorship, of some 
established name in literature ; from the Gnat which preluded to 
the jEneid, to the Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on. 

In those days every Morning Paper, as an essential retainer to 
its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily 
a quantum of witty paragraphs. Sixpence a joke — and it was 
thought pretty high too— was Dan Stuart's settled remuneration 
in these cases. The chat of the day, scandal, but, above all, 
dress, furnished the material. The length of no paragraph was 
to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must be 
poignant. 

A fashion of flesh, or rather pink-colored hose for the ladies, 
luckily coming up at the juncture when we were on our probation 
for the place of Chief Jester to S.'s Paper, established our reputa- 
tion in that line. We were pronounced a " capital hand." O 
the conceits which we varied upon red in all its prismatic differ- 
ences ! from the trite and obvious flower of Cytherea, to the 
flaming costume of the lady that has her sitting upon " many 
waters." Then there was the collateral topic of ankles. What 
an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, of touching that 
nice brink, and yet never trembling over it, of a seemingly ever 
approximating something " not quite proper ;" while, like a skil- 
ful posture-master, balancing betwixt decorums and their oppo- 
sites, he keeps the line, from which a hair's-breadth deviation is 
destruction ; hovering in the confines of light and darkness, 



286 ELIA, 

or where " both seem either ;" a hazy uncertain delicacy ; 
Autolycus-like in the Play, still putting off his expectant auditory 
with " Whoop, do me no harm, good man !" But, above all, that 
conceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff 
to remember, where, allusively to the flight of Astraea— ultima 
Calestum terras reliquit — we pronounced — in reference to the 
stockings still — that Modesty, taking her final leave of mor- 
tals, her last Blush was .visible in her ascent to the 
Heavens by the tract of the glowing instep. This might 
be called the crowning conceit ; and was esteemed tolerable 
writing in those days. 

But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, passes away ; 
as did the transient mode which had so favored us. The ankles 
of our fair friends in a few weeks began to reassume their white- 
ness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon. Other female whims 
followed, but none methought so pregnant, so invitatory of shrewd 
conceits, and more than single meanings. 

Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns daily, con- 
secutively for a fortnight, would surfeit the stoutest digestion. 
But to have to furnish as many jokes daily, and that not for a 
fortnight, but for a long twelvemonth, as we were constrained to 
do, was a little harder exaction. " Man goeth forth to his work 
until the evening" — from a reasonable hour in the morning, we 
presume it was meant. Now, as our main occupation took us up 
from eight till five every day in the City ; and as our evening 
hours, at that time of life, had generally to do with anything 
rather than business, it follows, that the only time we could spare 
for this manufactory of jokes — our supplementary livelihood, that 
supplied u§ in every want beyond mere bread and cheese — was 
exactly that part of the day which (as we have heard of No Man's 
Land) may be fitly denominated No Man's Time ; that is, no time 
in which a man ought to be up and awake, in. To speak more 
plainly, it is that time of an hour, or an hour and a half's dura- 
tion, in which a man, whose occasions call him up so preposte- 
rously, has to wait for his breakfast. 

O those head-aches at dawn of day, when at five, or half-past 
five in summer, and not much later in the dark seasons, we 
were compelled to rise, having been perhaps not above four hours 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 287 

in bed — (for we were no go-to-beds with the lamb, though we 
anticipated the lark ofttimes in her rising — we like a parting cup, 
at midnight, as all young men did before these effeminate times, 
and to have our friends about us — we were not constellated under 
Aquarius, that watery sign, and therefore incapable of Bacchus, cold, 
washy, bloodless — we were none of your Basilian water-sponges, 
nor had taken our degrees at Mount Ague — we were right toping 
Capulets, jolly companions, we and they) — but to have to get up, 
as we said before, curtailed of half our fair sleep, fasting, with 
only a dim vista of refreshing bohea, in the distance — to be 
necessitated to rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an old hag 
of a domestic, who seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in her 
announcement that it was "time to rise;" and whose chappy 
knuckles we have often yearned to amputate, and string them up 
at our chamber door, to be a terror to all such unseasonable rest- 
breakers in future 

" Facil" and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the " descending" 
of the over-night, balmy the first sinking of the heavy head upon 
the pillow ; but to get up, as he goes on to say, 

— revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad auras — 

and to get up moreover to make jokes with malice prepended — 
there was the " labor," there the " work." 

No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, 
our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out for half the 
tyranny which this necessity exercised upon us. Half a dozen 
jests in a day (bating Sundays too), why it seems nothing ! We 
make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of 
course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then they 
come into our head. But when the head has to go out to them — 
when the mountain must go to Mahomet — 

Reader, try it for once, only for one short twelvemonth. 

It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings came 
up; but mostly, instead of it, some rugged, untractable subject; 
some topic impossible to be contorted into the risible ; some fea- 
ture on which no smile could play ; some flint, from which no 
process of ingenuity could procure a scintillation. There they 



288 ELIA. 

lay ; there your appointed tale of brick-making was set before you, 
which you must finish, with or without straw, as it happened 
The craving Dragon — the Public — like him in Bel's temple — 
must be fed ; it expected its daily rations ; and Daniel, and our- 
selves, to do us justice, did the best we could on this side bursting 
him. 

While we were wringing out coy sprightlinesses for the Post, 
and writhing under the toil of what is called " easy writing," 
Bob Allen, our quondam schoolfellow, was tapping his impractica- 
ble brains in a like service for the " Oracle." Not that Robert 
troubled himself much about wit. If his paragraphs had a 
sprightly air about them, it was sufficient. He carried this non- 
chalance so far at last, that a matter of intelligence, and that no 
very important one, was not seldom palmed upon his employers 
for a good jest ; for example sake — " Walking yesterday morning 
casually down Snow Hill, who should we meet but Mr. Deputy 
Humphreys ! we rejoice to add, that the worthy Deputy appeared to 
enjoy a good state of health. We do not ever remember to have seen 
him look better." This gentleman so surprisingly met upon Snow 
Hill, from some peculiarities in gait or gesture, was a constant 
butt for mirth to the small paragraph-mongers of the day ; and 
our friend thought that he might have his fling at him with the 
rest. We met A. in Holborn shortly after this extraordinary ren- 
counter, which he told with tears of satisfaction in his eyes, and 
chuckling at the anticipated effects of its announcement next day 
in the paper. We did not quite comprehend where the wit of it 
lay at the time ; nor was it easy to be detected, when the thing 
came out advantaged by type and letter-press. He had better 
have met anything that morning than a Common Council Man. 
His services were shortly after dispensed with, on the plea that 
his paragraphs of late had been deficient in point. The one in 
question, it must be owned, had an air, in the opening especially, 
proper to awaken curiosity ; and the sentiment, or moral, wears 
the aspect of humanity and good neighborly feeling. But some- 
how the conclusion was not judged altogether to answer to the 
magnificent promise of the premises. We traced our friend's pen 
afterwards in the f < True Briton," the " Star," the " Traveller " 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 289 

— from all which he was successively dismissed, the Proprietors 
having "no further occasion for his services." Nothing was 
easier than to detect him. When wit failed, or topics ran low, 
there constantly appeared the following — " It is not generally 
known that the three Blue Balls at the Pawnbrokers' shops are 
the ancient arms of Lombardy. The Lombards were the first 
money-brokers in Europe" Bob has done more to set the public 
right on this important point of blazonry, than the whole College 
of Heralds. 

The appointment of a regular wit has long ceased to be a part 
of the economy of a Morning Paper. Editors find their own 
jokes, or do as well without them. Parson Este, and Topham, 
brought up the set custom of " witty paragraphs " first in the 
" World." Boaden was a reigning paragraphist in his day, and 
succeeded poor Allen in the " Oracle." But, as we said, the 
fashion of jokes passes away ; and it would be difficult to discover 
in the biographer of Mrs. Siddons, any traces of that vivacity and 
fancy which charmed the whole town at the commencement of 
the present century. Even the prelusive delicacies of the pre- 
sent writer — the curt " Astrsean allusion " — would be thought 
pedantic and out of date in these days. 

From the office of the Morning Post (for we may as well ex- 
haust our Newspaper Reminiscences at once) by change of pro- 
perty in the paper, we were transferred, mortifying exchange ! to 
the office of the Albion Newspaper, late Rackstrow's Museum, in 
Fleet street. What a transition — from a handsome apartment, 
from rose- wood desks, and silver ink -stands, to an office — no office, 
but a den rather, but just redeemed from the occupation of dead 
monsters, of which it seemed redolent — from the centre of loy- 
alty and fashion, to a focus of vulgarity and sedition ! Here in 
murky closet, inadequate from its square contents to the receipt 
of the two bodies of Editor, and humble paragraph-maker, together 
at one time, sat. in the discharge of his new editorial functions 
(the " Bigod " of Elia) the redoubted John Fenwick. 

F., without a guinea in his pocket, and having left not many 
in the pockets of his friends whom he might command, had pur- 
chased (on tick doubtless) the whole and sole Editorship, Proprie- 
20 



290 ELIA. 

torship, with all the rights and titles (such as they were worth) of 
the Albion from one Lovell ; of whom we know nothing, save 
that he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of Wales. 
With this hopeless concern — for it had been sinking ever since its 
commencement, and could now reckon upon not more than a hun- 
dred subscribers — F. resolutely determined upon pulling down 
the Government in the first instance, and making both our for- 
tunes by way of corollary. For seven weeks and more did this 
infatuated democrat go about boi rowing seven-shilling pieces, and 
lesser coin, to meet the daily demands of the Stamp office, which 
allowed no credit to publications of that side in politics. An out- 
cast from politer bread, we attached our small talents to the for- 
lorn fortunes of our friend. Our occupation now was to write 
treason. 

Recollections of feelings — which were all that now remained 
from our first boyish heats kindled by the French Revolution, 
when, if we were misled, we erred in the company of some who 
are accounted very good men now — rather than any tendency at 
this time to Republican doctrines — assisted us in assuming a style 
of writing, while the paper lasted, consonant in no very under 
tone — to the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to 
insinuate, rather than recommend, possible abdications. Blocks, 
axes, Whitehall tribunals, were covered with flowers of so cun- 
ning a periphrasis — as Mr. Bayes says, never naming the thing 
directly — that the keen eye of an Attorney General was insuffi- 
cient to detect the lurking snake among them. There were times, 
indeed, when we sighed for our more gentleman-like occupation 
under Stuart. But with change of masters it is ever change of 
service. Already one paragraph, and another, as we learned 
afterwards from a gentleman at the Treasury, had begun to be 
marked at that office, with a view of its being submitted at least 
to the attention of the proper Law Officers — when an unlueky, 

or rather lucky epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J s 

M h, who was on the eve of departing for India to reap the 

fruits of his apostasy, as F. pronounced it (it is hardly worth 
particularising), happening to offend the nice sense of Lord, or, 
as he then delighted to be called, Citizen Stanhope 5 deprived F. at 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 291 

once of the last hopes of a guinea from the last patron that had 
stuck by us ; and breaking up our establishment, left us to the 
safe, but somewhat mortifying, neglect of the Crown Lawyers. 
It was about this time, or a little earlier, that Dan Stuart made that 
curious confession to us, that he had " never deliberately walked 
into aa Exhibition at Somerset House in his life." 



292 ELIA 



BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY 

IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 






Hogarth excepted, can we produce any one painter within tne 
last fifty years, or since the humor of exhibiting began, that has 
treated a story imaginatively ? By this we mean, upon whom his 
subject has so acted, that it has seemed to direct him — not to be ar- 
ranged by him ? Any upon whom its leading or collateral points 
have impressed themselves so tyrannically, that he dared not 
treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a revelation ? Any that 
has imparted to his compositions, not merely so much truth 
as is enough to convey a story with clearness, but that indi- 
vidualising property, which should keep the subject so treated 
distinct in feature from every other subject, however similar, and 
to common apprehensions almost identical ; so as that we might 
say, this and this part could have found an appropriate place in 
no other picture in the world but this ? Is there anything in mo- 
dern art — we will not demand that it should be equal — but in 
any way analogous to what Titian has effected, in that wonderful 
bringing together of two times in the " Ariadne,' 5 in the National 
Gallery ? Precipitous, with his reeling satyr rout about him, 
re-peopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with 
a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire-like flings 
himself at the Cretan. This is the time present. With this tell- 
ing of the story — an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain 
richly proud. Guido, in his harmonious version of it, saw no 
further. But from the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has 
recalled past time, and laid it contributory with the present to one 
simultaneous effect. With the desert all ringing with the mad 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 293 

cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence and new 
offers of a god — as if unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting 
her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant — her soul undis- 
tracted from Theseus — Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore 
in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same local solitude, 
with which she awoke at day-break to catch the forlorn last 
glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian. 

Here are two points miraculously co-uniting ; fierce society, 
with the feeling of solitude still absolute; noon-day revelations 
with the accidents of the dull grey dawn unquenched and linger - 
ing ; the present Bacchus, with the past Ariadne ; two stories, 
with double Time ; separate and harmonising. Had the artist 
made the woman one shade less indifferent to the God ; still 
more, had she expressed a rapture at his advent, where would 
have been the story of the mighty desolation of the heart pre- 
vious ? merged in the insipid accident of a flattering offer met 
with a welcome acceptance. The broken heart for Theseus was 
not lightly to be pieced up by a God. 

We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture by Ra- 
phael in the Vatican. It is the Presentation of the new-born Eve 
to Adam by the Almighty. A fairer mother of mankind we 
might imagine, and a goodlier sire perhaps of men since born. 
But these are matters subordinate to the conception of the situation, 
displayed in this extraordinary production. A tolerably modern 
artist would have been satisfied with tempering certain raptures 
of connubial anticipation, with a suitable acknowledgment to the 
Giver of the blessing, in the countenance of the first bridegroom ; 
something like the divided attention of the child (Adam was here 
a child-man) between the given toy, and the mother who had just 
blessed it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the first-sight 
view, the superficial. An artist of a higher grade, considering 
the awful presence they were in, would have taken care to sub- 
tract something from the expression of the more human passion, 
and to heighten the more spiritual one. This would be as much 
as an exhibition goer, from the opening of Somerset House to last 
year's show, has been encouraged to look for. It is obvious to 
hint at a lower expression yet, in a picture that, for respects of 
drawing and coloring, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible 



294 ELIA. 

within these art- fostering walls, in which the raptures should be as 
ninety-nine, the gratitude as one, or perhaps zero ! By neither 
the one passion nor the other has Raphael expounded the situation 
of Adam. Singly upon his brow sits the absorbing sense of won- 
der at the created miracle. The moment is seized by the intuitive 
artist, perhaps not self-conscious of his art, in which neither of 
conflicting emotions — a moment how abstracted ! — have had time 
to spring up, or to battle for indecorous mastery. — We have seen 
a landscape of a justly admired neoteric, in which he aimed at 
delineating a fiction, one of the most severely beautiful in anti- 
quity — the gardens of the Hesperides. To do Mr. — justice, 

he had painted a laudable orchard, with fitting seclusion, and a 
veritable dragon (of which a Polypheme, by Poussin, is somehow 
a fac-simile for the situation), looking over into the world, shut 
out backwards, so that none but a " still-climbing Hercules " 
could hope to catch a peep at the admired Ternary of Recluses. 
No conventual porter could keep his eyes better than this custos 
with the " lidless eyes." He not only sees that none do intrude 
into that privacy, but, as clear as daylight, that none but Hercules 
aut Bidbolus by any manner of means can. So far all is well. 
We have absolute solitude here or nowhere. Ao extra the dam- 
sels are snug enough. But here the artist's courage seems to 
have failed him. He began to pity his pretty charge, and, to com- 
fort the irksomeness, has peopled their solitude with a bevy of fair 
attendants, maids of honor, or ladies of the bed-chamber, accord- 
ing to the approved etiquette at a court of the nineteenth century ; 
giving to the whole scene the air of a fete champetre, if we will 
but excuse the absence of the gentlemen. This is well, and 
Watteauish. But what is become of the solitary mystery — the 

Daughters three, 
That sing round the golden tree ? 

This is not the way in which Poussin would have treated this 
subject. 

The paintings, or rather the stupendous architectural designs, 
of a modern artist, have been urged as objections to the theory of 
our motto. They are of a character, we confess, to stagger it. 
His towered structures are of the highest order of the material 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 295 

sublime. Whether they were dreams, or transcripts of some elder 
workmanship— Assyrian ruins old — restored by this mighty art- 
ist, they satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of the 
glories of the antique world. It is a pity that they were ever 
peopled. On that side, the imagination of the artist halts, and 
appears defective. Let us examine the point of the story in the 
" Belshazzar's Feast." We will introduce it by an apposite 
anecdote. 

The court historians of the day record^ that at the first dinner 
given by the late King (then Prince Regent) at the Pavilion, the 
following characteristic frolic was played off. The guests were 
select and admiring ; the banquet profuse and admirable ; the 
lights lustrous and oriental ; the eye was perfectly dazzled with 
the display of plate, among which the great gold salt-cellar, 
brought from the regalia in the Tower for this especial purpose, 
itself a tower ! stood conspicuous for its magnitude. And now 
the Rev. * * * *, the then admired court Chaplain, was proceed- 
ing with the grace, when, at a signal given, the lights were sud- 
denly overcast, and a huge transparency was discovered, in 
gold letters — 

" Brighton — Earthquake — Swallow-up-alive !" 

Imagine the confusion of the guests ; the Georges and garters, 
jewels, bracelets, moulted upon the occasion ! The fans dropped, 
and picked up the next morning by the sly court pages ! Mrs. 
Fitz-what's-her-name fainting, and the Countess of * * * holding 
the smelling-bottle, till the good-humored Prince caused harmony 
to be restored, by calling in fresh candles, and declaring that the 
whole was nothing but a pantomime hoax, got up by the ingenious 
Mr. Farley, of Covent Garden, from hints which his Royal High- 
ness himself had furnished ! Then imagine the infinite applause 
that followed, the mutual rally ings, the declarations that " they 
were not much frightened," of the assembled galaxy. 

The point of time in the picture exactly answers to the appear- 
ance of the transparency in the anecdote. The huddle, the 
flutter, the bustle, the escape, the alarm, and the mock alarm ; 
the prettinesses heightened by consternation ; the courtier's fear 
which was flattery ; and the lady's which was affectation ; all 



296 ELIA. 

that we may conceive to have taken place in a mob of Brighton 
courtiers, sympathizing with the well-acted surprise of their sove- 
reign ; ali this, and no more, is exhibited by the well-dressed 
lords and ladies in the Hall of Belus. Just this sort of conster- 
nation we have seen among a flock of disquieted wild, geese at the 
report only of a gun having gone off ! 

But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal anxiety for the pre- 
servation of their persons, — such as we have witnessed at a thea- 
tre, when a slight alarm of fire has been given — an adequate 
exponent of a supernatural terror ? the way in which the finger 
of God, writing judgments, would have been met by the withered 
conscience ? 'There is a human fear, and a divine fear. The 
one is disturbed, restless, and bent upon escape. The other is 
bowed down, effortless, passive. When the spirit appeared before 
Eliphaz in the visions of the night, and the hair of his flesh stood 
up, was it in the thoughts of the Temanite to ring the bell of his 
chamber, or to call up the servants ? But let us see in the text 
what there is to justify all this huddle of vulgar consternation. 

From the words of Daniel it appears that Belshazzar had made 
a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before 
the thousand. The gold and silver vessels are gorgeously enu- 
merated, with the princes, the king's concubines, and his wives. 
Then follows — 

" In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and 
wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall 
of the king's palace ; and the king saw the part of the hand that 
wrote. Then the Icing's countenance was changed, and his 
thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosen- 
ed, and his knees smote one against another." 

This is the plain text. By no hint can it be otherwise inferred 
but that the appearance was solely confined to the fancy of Bel- 
shazzar, that his single brain was troubled. Not a word is spoken 
of its being seen by any else there present, not even by the queen 
herself, who merely undertakes for the interpretation of the phe- 
nomenon, as related to her, doubtless, by her husband. The 
lords are simply said to be astonished ; L e., at the trouble and 
the change of countenance in their sovereign. Even the prophet 
does not appear to have seen the scroll, which the king saw. He 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 29*7 

recals it only, as Joseph did the Dream to the King of Egypt. 
" Then was the part of the hand sent from him [the Lord], and 
this writing was written." He speaks of the phantasm as past. 

Then what becomes of this needless multiplication of the mira- 
cle 1 this message to a royal conscience, singly expressed — for it 
was said, " Thy kingdom is divided," — simultaneously impressed 
upon the fancies of a thousand courtiers, who were implied in it 
neither directly nor grammatically ? 

But admitting the artist's own version of the story, and that the 
sight was seen also by the thousand courtiers — let it have been 
visible to all Babylon — as the knees of Belshazzar were shaken, 
and his countenance troubled, even so would the knees of every 
man in Babylon, and their countenances, as of an individual man, 
have been troubled ; bowed, bent down, so would they have 
remained, stupor-fixed, with no thought of struggling with that 
inevitable judgment. 

Not all that is optically possible to be seen, is to be shown in 
every picture. The eye delightedly dwells upon the brilliant 
individualities in a " Marriage at Cana," by Veronese, or Titian, 
to the very texture and color of the wedding-garments, the ring 
glittering upon the bride's finger, the metal and fashion of the 
wine-pots ; for at such seasons there is leisure and luxury to be 
curious. But in a " day of judgment," or in a " day of lesser 
horrors, yet divine," as at the impious feast of Belshazzar, the 
eye should see, as the actual eye of an agent or patient in the 
immediate scene would see, only in masses and indistinction. 
Not only the female attire and jewelry exposed to the critical eye 
of fashion, as minutely as the dresses in a Lady's Magazine, in 
the criticized picture, — but perhaps the curiosities of anatomical 
science, and studied diversities of posture, in the falling angels 
and sinners of Michael Angelo, — have no business in their great 
subjects. There was no leisure for them. 

By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got at 
their true conclusions ; by not showing the actual appearances, 
that is, all that was to be seen at any given moment by an indif- 
ferent eye, but only what the eye might be supposed to see in the 
doing or suffering of some portentous action. Suppose" the mo- 
ment of the swallowing up of Pompeii. There they were to be 



298 ELIA. 

seen — houses, columns, architectural proportions, differences of 
public and private buildings, men and women at their standing 
occupations, the diversified thousand postures, attitudes, dresses, 
in some confusion truly, but physically they were visible. But 
what eye saw them at that eclipsing moment, which reduces con- 
fusion to a kind of unity, and when the senses are upturned from 
their proprieties, when sight and hearing are a feeling only ? A 
thousand years have passed, and we are at leisure to contemplate 
the weaver fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker at his oven, 
and to turn over with antiquarian coolness the pots and pans of 
Pompeii. 

16 Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, in the 
valley of Ajalon." Who, in reading this magnificent Hebraism, 
in his conception, sees aught but the heroic son of Nun, with the 
outstretched arm, and the greater and lesser light obsequious ? 
Doubtless there were to be seen hill and dale, and chariots and 
horsemen, on open plain, or winding by secret defiles, and all the 
circumstances and stratagems of war. But whose eyes would 
have been conscious of this array at the interposition of the syn- 
chronic miracle ? Yet in the picture of this subject by the artist 
of the " Belshazzar's Feast" — no ignoble work either — the mar- 
shalling and landscape of the war is everything, the miracle 
sinks into an anecdote of the day ; and the eye may " dart through 
rank and file traverse " for some minutes, before it shall discover, 
among his armed followers, which is Joshua ! Not modern art 
alone, but ancient, where only it is to be found if anywhere, 
can be detected erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty. 
The world has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, 
transcending the figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, in 
the great picture at Angerstein's. It seems a thing between two 
beings. A ghastly horror at itself struggles with newly-appre- 
hending gratitude at second life bestowed. It cannot forget that 
it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a body. It has to tell 
of the world of spirits. — Was it from a feeling, that the crowd of 
half-impassioned bystanders, and the still more irrelevant herd of 
passers-by at a distance, who have not heard, or but faintly have 
been told of the passing miracle, admirable as they are in design 
and hue — for it is a glorified work — do not respond adeauately to 



ON THE I RODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 299 

the action — that the single figure of the Lazarus has been attri- 
buted to Michael Angelo, and the mighty Sebastian unfairly- 
robbed of the fame of the greater half of the interest ? Now that 
there were not indifferent passers-by within actual scope of the 
eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound of it had 
but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood to deny ; 
but would they see them ? or can the mind in the conception of 
it admit of such unconcerning objects ; can it think of them at all ? 
or what associating league to the imagination can there be between 
the seers, and the seers not, of a presential miracle ? 

Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we 
will ask whether, in the present low state of expectation, the pa- 
tron would not, or ought not, be fully satisfied with a beautiful 
naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks ? Disseat those 
woods, and place the same figure among fountains, and fall of 
pellucid water, and you have a — Naiad ! Not so in a rough print 
we have seen after Julio Romano, we think — for it is long since — 
there, by no process, with mere change of scene, could the figure 
have reciprocated characters. Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet 
with a grace of her own, beautiful in convolution and distortion, 
linked to her connatural tree, co-twisting with its limbs her own, 
till both seemed either — these, animated branches ; those, disani- 
mated members — yet the animal and vegetable lives sufficiently 
kept distinct — his Dryad lay — an approximation of two natures, 
which to conceive, it must be seen ; analogous to, not the same 
with, the delicacies of O vidian transformations. 

To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial comprehension, the 
most barren, the Great Masters gave loftiness and fruitfulness. 
The large eye of genius saw in the meanness of present objects 
their capabilities of treatment from their relations to some grand 
Past or Future. How has Raphael — we must still linger about 
the Vatic an-^— treated the humble craft of the ship-builders, in his 
" Building of the Ark ?" It is in that scriptural series, to which 
we have referred, and which, judging him from some fine rough, 
old graphic sketches of them which we possess, seem to be of a 
higher and more poetic grade than even the Cartoons. The dim 
of sight are the timid and the shrinking. There is a cowardice 
in modern art. As the Frenchman, of whom Coleridge's friend 



800 ELIA. 

made the prophetic guess at Rome, from the beard and horns of 
the Moses of Michael Angelo, collected no inferences beyond that 
of a He Goat and a Cornuto ; so from this subject, of mere me- 
chanic promise, it would instinctively turn away, as from one in- 
capable of investiture with any grandeur. The dock-yards at 
Woolwich would object derogatory associations. The depot at 
Chatham would be the mote and the beam in its intellectual eye. 
But not to the nautical preparations in the ship-yards of Civita 
Vecchia did Raphael look for instructions, when he imagined the 
Building of the Vessel that was to be conservatory of the wrecks 
of the species of drowned mankind. In the. intensity of the ac- 
tion, he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the operation. 
There is the Patriarch, in calm forethought, and with holy pre- 
science, giving directions. And there are his agents — the solitary 
but sufficient Three — hewing, sawing, every one with the might 
and earnestness of a Demiurgus ; under some instinctive rather 
than technical guidance ! giant-muscled ; every one a Hercules, 
or liker to those Vulcanian Three, that in sounding caverns under 
Mongibello wrought in fire — Brontes, and black Steropes, and 
Pyracmon. So work the workmen that should repair a world ! 

Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with 'pictorial 
subjects. In the latter, the exterior accidents are nearly every- 
thing, the unseen qualities as nothing. Othello's color — the 
infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstaff — do they haunt 
us perpetually in the reading 1 or are they obtruded upon our 
conceptions one time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration 
at the respective moral or intellectual attributes of the character ? 
But in a picture Othello is always a Blackamoor ; and the other 
only Plump Jack. Deeply corporealised, and enchained hope- 
lessly in the grovelling fetters of externality, must be the mind, 
to which, in its better moments, the image of the high-souled, 
high-intelligenced Quixote — the errant Star of Knighthood, made 
more tender by eclipse — has never presented itself, divested from 
the unhallowed accompaniment of a Sancho, or a rabblement at 
the heels of Rosinante. That man has read his book by halves ; 
he has laughed, mistaking his author's purport, which was — tears. 
The artist that pictures Quixote (and it is in this degrading point 
that he is every season held up at our Exhibitions) in the shallow 



ON. THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 801 

hope of exciting mirth, would have joined the rabble at the heels 
of his starved steed. We wish not to see that counterfeited, which 
we would not have wished to see in, the reality. Conscious of the 
heroic inside of the noble Quixote, who, on hearing that his 
withered person was passing, would have stepped over his thresh- 
old to gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, and the " strange bed- 
fellows which misery brings a man acquainted with?" Shade of 
Cervantes ! who in thy Second Part could put into the mouth of 
thy Quixote those high aspirations of a super-chivalrous gallantry, 
where he replies to one of the shepherdesses, apprehensive that 
he would spoil their pretty net-works, and inviting him to be a 
guest with them, in accents like these : " Truly, fairest Lady, 
Actseon was not more astonished when he saw Diana bathing her- 
self at the fountain, than I have been in beholding your beauty ; 
I commend the manner of your pastime, and thank you for your 
kind offers ; and, if I may serve you, so I may be sure you will 
be obeyed, you may comm'and me : for my profession is this, To 
show myself thankful, and a doer of good to all sorts of people, 
especially of the rank that your person shows you to be ; and if 
those nets, as they take up but a little piece of ground, should 
take up the whole world, I would seek out new worlds to pass 
through, rather than break them : and (he adds) that you may 
give credit to this my exaggeration, behold at least he that pro- 
miseth you this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name 
hath come to your hearing." Illustrious Romancer! were the 
" fine frenzies," which possessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a 
fit subject, as in this Second Part, to be exposed to the jeers of 
Duennas and Serving Men ? to be monstered, and shown up at 
the heartless banquets of great men ? Was that pitiable infirmity, 
which in thy First Part misleads him, always from within, into half- 
ludicrous, but more than half-compassionable and admirable 
errors, not infliction enough from heaven, that men by studied 
artifices must devise and practise upon the humor, to inflame 
where they should soothe it ? Why, Goneril would have blushed 
to practise upon the abdicated king at this rate, and the she-wolf 
Regan not have endured to play the pranks upon his fled wits, 



302 ELIA. 

which thou hast made thy, Quixote suffer in Duchesses' halls, 
and at the hands of that unworthy nobleman.* 

In the First Adventures, even. It needed all the art of the most 
consummate artist in the Book way that the world hath yet seen, 
to keep up in the mind of the reader the heroic attributes of the 
character without relaxing ; so as absolute y that they shall suffer 
no alloy from the debasing fellowship of the clown. If it ever 
obtrudes itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh ; or 
not, rather, to indulge a contrary emotion ? — Cervantes, stung, 
perchance, by the relish with which his Reading Public had re- 
ceived the fooleries of the man, more to their palates than the 
generosities of the master, in the sequel let his pen run riot, lost 
the harmony and the balance, and sacrificed a great idea to the 
taste of his contemporaries. We know that in the present day 
the Knight has fewer admirers than the Squire. Anticipating, 
what did actually happen to him — as afterwards it did to his 
scarce inferior follower, the Author of " Guzman de Alfarache " 
— that some less knowing hand would prevent him by a spurious 
Second Part ; and judging that it would be easier for his com- 
petitor to out-bid him in the comicalities, than in the romance, of 
his work, he abandoned his Knight, and has fairly set up the 
Squire for his Hero. For what else has he unsealed the eyes of 
Sancho ? and instead of that twilight state of semi-insanity — the 
madness at second hand — the contagion, caught from a stronger 
mind infected — that war between native cunning, and hereditary 
deference, with which he has hitherto accompanied his master — 
two for a pair almost — does he substitute a downright Knave, with 
open eyes, for his own ends only following a confessed Madman ; 
and offering at one time to lay, if not actually laying, hands 
upon him ! From the moment that Sancho loses his reverence, 
Don Quixote is become— a treatable lunatic. Our artists handle 
him accordingly. 

* Yet from this Second Part, our cried-up pictures are mostly selected ; 
the waiting- worn en with beards, &c. 



THE WEDDING 303 



THE WEDDING. 



I do not know when I have been better pleased than at being in- 
vited last week to be present at the wedding of a friend's daugh- 
ter. I like to make one at these ceremonies, which to us old 
people give back our youth in a manner, and restore our gayest 
season, in the remembrance of our own success, or the regrets, 
scarcely less tender, of our own youthful disappointments, in this 
point of a settlement. On these occasions I am sure to be in 
good-humor for a week or two after, and enjoy a reflected honey- 
moon. Being without a family, I am flattered with these tem- 
porary adoptions into a friend's family ; I feel a sort of cousin- 
hood, or uncleship, for the season ; I am inducted into degrees 
of affinity ; and, in the participated socialities of the little com- 
munity, I lay down for a brief while my solitary bachelorship. 
I carry this humor so far, that I take it unkindly to be left out, 
even when a funeral is going on in the house of a dear friend. 

But to my subject. 

The union itself had been long settled, but its celebration had 
been hitherto deferred, to an almost unreasonable state of sus- 
pense in the lovers, by some invincible prejudices which the 
bride's father had unhappily contracted upon the subject of the 
too early marriages of females. He has been lecturing any- 
time these five years — for to that length the courtship has been 
protracted — upon the propriety of putting off the solemnity, till 
the lady should have completed her five-and-twentieth year. We 
all began to be afraid that a suit, which as yet had abated of none 
of its ardors, might at last be lingered on, till passion had time to 
cool, and love go out in the experiment. But a little wheedling 
on the part of his wife, who was by no means a party to these 



304 ELIA. 

overstrained notions, joined to some serious expostulations on tnat 
of his friends, who, from the growing infirmities of the old gen- 
tleman, could not promise ourselves many years' enjoyment of 
his company, and were anxious to bring matters to a conclusion 
during his lifetime, at length prevailed ; and on Monday last the 

daughter of my old friend, Admiral — , having attained the 

womanly age of nineteen, was conducted to the church by her 

pleasant cousin J , who told some few years older. 

Before the youthful part of my female readers express their in- 
dignation at the abominable loss of time occasioned to the lovers 
by the preposterous notions of my old friend, they will do well to 
consider the reluctance which a fond parent naturally feels at 
parting with his child. To this unwillingness, I believe, in most 
cases may be traced the difference of opinion on this point 
between child and parent, whatever pretences of interest or pru- 
dence may be held out to cover it. The hard-heartedness of 
fathers is a fine theme for romance writers, a sure and moving 
topic ; but is there not something untender, to say no more of it, 
in the hurry which a beloved child is sometimes in to tear herself 
from the paternal stock, and commit herself to strange graftings ? 
The case is heightened where the lady, as in the present instance, 
happens to be an only child. I do not understand these matters 
experimentally, but I can make a shrewd guess at the wounded 
pride of a parent upon these occasions. It is no new observa- 
tion, I believe, that a lover in most cases has no rival so much 
to be feared as the father. Certainly there is a jealousy in un- 
parallel subjects, which is little less heart-rending than the pas- 
sion which we more strictly christen by that name. Mothers' 
scruples are more easily got over ; for this reason, I suppose, that 
the protection transferred to a husband is less a derogation and a 
loss to their authority than to the paternal. Mothers, besides, 
have a trembling foresight, which paints the inconveniences (im- 
possible to be conceived in the same degree by the other parent) 
of a life of forlorn celibacy, which the refusal of a tolerable 
match may entail upon their child. Mothers' instinct is a surer 
guide here, than the cold reasonings of a father on such a topic. 
To this instinct may be imputed, and by it alone may be excused, 
the unbeseeming artifices, by which some wives push on the 



THE WEDDING. 305 

matrimonial projects of their daughters, which the husband, how- 
ever approving, shall entertain with comparative indifference. 
A little shamelessness on this Read is pardonable. With this ex- 
planation, forwardness becomes a grace, and maternal importu- 
nity receives the name of a virtue. — But the parson stays, while 
I preposterously assume his office ; I am preaching, while the 
bride is on the threshold. 

Nor let any of my female readers suppose that the sage reflec- 
tions which have just escaped me have the obliquest tendency of 
application to the young lady, who, it will be seen, is" about to 
venture upon a change in her condition, at a mature and compe- 
tent age, and not without the fullest approbation of all parties. I 
only deprecate very hasty marriages. 

It had been fixed that the ceremony should be gone through at 
an early hour, to give time for a little dejeune afterwards, to which 
a select party of friends had been invited. We were in church 
a little before the clock struck eight. 

Nothing could be more judicious or graceful than the dress of 
the bride-maids — the three charming Miss Foresters — on this 
morning. To give the bride an opportunity of shining singly, 
they had come habited all in green. I am ill at describing female 
apparel ; but while she stood at the altar in vestments white and 
candid as her thoughts, a sacrificial whiteness, they assisted in 
robes, such as might become Diana's nymphs — Foresters indeed 
— as such who had not yet come to the resolution of putting off 
cold virginity. These young maids, not being so blest as to have 
a mother living, I am told, keep single for their father's sake, and 
live all together so happy with their remaining parent, that the 
hearts of their lovers are ever broken with the prospect (so in- 
auspicious to their hopes) of such uninterrupted and provoking 
home-comfort. Gallant girls ! each a victim worthy of Iphige- 
nia ! 

I do not know what business I have to be present in solemn 
places. I cannot divest me of an unseasonable disposition to 
levity upon the most awful occasions. I was never cut out for a 
public functionary. Ceremony and I have long shaken hands ; 
but I could not resist the importunities of the young lady's father, 
whose gout unhappily confined him at home, to act as parent on 
21 



306 ELIA. 

this occasion, and give away the bride. Something ludicrous oc- 
curred to me at this most serious of all moments — a sense of my 
unfitness to have the disposal, even in imagination, of the sweet 
young creature beside me. I fear I was betrayed to some lightness, 
for the awful eye of the parson — and the rector's eye of Saint Mil- 
dred's in the Poultry is no trifle of a rebuke — was upon me in an 
instant, souring my incipient jest to the tristful severities of a fu- 
neral. 

This was the only misbehavior which I can plead to upon this 
solemn occasion, unless what was objected to me after the cere- 
mony, by one of the handsome Miss T s, be accounted a sole- 
cism. She was pleased to say that she had never seen a gentle- 
man before me give away a bride, in black. Now black has 
been my ordinary apparel so long — indeed I take it to be the 
proper costume of an author — the stage sanctions it — that to have 
appeared in some lighter color would have raised more mirth at 
my expense, than the anomaly had created censure. But I could 
perceive that the bride's mother, and some elderly ladies present 
(God bless them !) would have been well content, if I had come 
in any other color than that. But I got over the omen by a lucky 
apologue, which I remembered out of Pilpay, or some Indian 
author, of all the birds being invited to the linnet's wedding, at 
which, when all the rest came in their gayest feathers, the raven 
alone apologized for his cloak because " he had no other." This 
tolerably reconciled the elders. But with the young people all 
was merriment, and shaking of hands, and congratulations, and 
kissing away the bride's tears, and kissing from her in return, 
till a young lady, who assumed some experience in these matters, 
having worn the nuptial bands some four or five weeks longer 
than her friend, rescued her, archly observing, with half an eye 
upon the bridegroom, that at this rate she would have " none 
left." 

My friend the admiral was in fine wig and buckle on this occa- 
sion — a striking contrast to his usual neglect of personal appear- 
ance. He did not once shove up his borrowed locks (his custom 
ever at his morning studies) to betray the few grey stragglers of 
his own beneath them. He wore an aspect of thoughtful satis- 
faction. I trembled for the hour, which at length approached, 



THE WEDDING. 307 

when after a protracted breakfast of three hours — if stores of cold 
fowls, tongues, hams, botargoes, dried fruits, wines, cordials, &c, 
can deserve so meagre an appellation — the coach was announced, 
which was come to carry off the bride and bridegroom for a sea- 
son, as custom has sensibly ordained, into the country ; upon 
which design, wishing them a felicitous journey, let us return to 
the assembled guests. 

As when a well-graced actor leaves the stage, 

The eyes of men 

Are idly bent on him that enters next, 

so idly did we bend our eyes upon one another, when the chief 
performers in the morning's pageant had vanished. None told 
his tale. None sipped her glass. The poor Admiral made an 
effort — it was not much. I had anticipated so far. Even the 
infinity of full satisfaction, that had betrayed itself through the 
prim looks and quiet deportment of his lady, began to wane into 
something of misgiving. No one knew whether to take their 
leaves or stay. We seemed assembled upon a silly occasion. In 
this crisis, betwixt tarrying and departure, I must do justice to a 
foolish talent of mine, which had otherwise like to have brought 
me into disgrace in the fore-part of the day ; I mean a power, in 
any emergeney, of thinking and giving vent to all manner of 
strange nonsense. In this awkward dilemma I found it sovereign. 
I rattled off some of my most excellent absurdities. All were 
willing to be relieved, at any expense of reason, from the pres- 
sure of the intolerable vacuum which had succeeded tolhe morn- 
ing bustle. By this means- 1 was fortunate in keeping together 
the better part of the company to a late hour ; and a rubber of 
whist (the Admiral's favorite game) with some rare strokes of 
chance as well as skill, which came opportunely on his side — 
lengthened out till midnight — dismissed the old gentleman at last 
to his bed with comparatively easy spirits. 

I have been at my old friend's various times since. I do not 
know a visiting place where every guest is so perfectly at his 
ease ; nowhere, where harmony is so strangely the result of con- 
fusion. Everybody is at cross-purposes, yet the effect is so much 
better than uniformity. Contradictory orders ; servants pulling 



308 ELIA. 

one way ; master and mistress driving some other, yet both di- 
verse ; visitors huddled up in corners ; chairs unsymmetrised ; 
candles disposed by chance ; meals at odd hours, tea and supper 
at once, or the latter preceding the former ; the host and the guest 
conferring, yet each upon a different topic, each understanding 
himself, neither trying to understand or hear the other ; draughts 
and politics, chess and political economy, cards and conversation 
on nautical matters, going on at once, without the hope, or indeed 
the wish, of distinguishing them, make it altogether the most per- 
fect concordia discors you shall meet with. Yet somehow the old 
house is not quite what it should be. The Admiral still enjoys 
his pipe, but he has no Miss Emily to fill it for him. The instru- 
ment stands where it stood, but she is gone, whose delicate touch 
could sometimes for a short minute appease the warring elements. 
He has learnt, as Marvel expresses it, to " make his destiny his 
choice. 55 He bears bravely up, but he does not come out with 
his flashes of wild wit so thick as formerly. His sea songs seldom 
escape him. His wife, too, looks as if she wanted some younger 
body to scold and set to rights. We all miss a junior presence. 
It is wonderful how one young maiden freshens up, and keeps 
green, the paternal roof. Old and young seem to have an inte- 
rest in her, so long as she is not absolutely disposed of. The 
youthfulness of the house is flown. Emily is married. 



REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. 809 



REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. 



The Old Year being dead, and the New Year coming of age, 
which he does, by Calendar Law, as soon as the breath is out of 
the old gentleman's body, nothing would serve the young spark 
but he must give a dinner upon the occasion, to which all the 
Days in the year were invited. The Festivals, whom he deputed 
as his stewards, were mightily taken with the notion. They had 
been engaged time out of mind, they said, in providing mirth and 
good cheer for mortals below ; and it was time they should have 
a taste of their own bounty. It was stiffly debated among them, 
whether the Fasts should be admitted. Some said, the appear- 
ance, of such lean, starved guests, with their mortified faces, 
would pervert the ends of the meeting. But the objection was 
over-ruled by Christmas Day, who had a design upon Ash Wed- 
nesday (as you shall hear), and a mighty desire to see how the 
old Domine would behave himself in his cups. Only the Vigils 
were requested to come with their lanterns, to light the gentlefolks 
home at night. 

All the Days came to their day. Covers were provided for 
three hundred and sixty-five guests at the principal table ; with 
an occasional knife and fork at the side-board for the Twenty- 
Ninth of February. 

I should have told you, that cards of invitation had been issued. 
The carriers were the Hours ; twelve little, merry, whirligig 
foot-pages, as you should desire to see, that went all round, and 
found out the persons invited well enough, with the exception 
of Easter Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a few such Moveables, who 
had lately shifted their quarters. 

Well, they all met at last, foul Days, fine Days, all sorts of 



310 ELIA. 

Bays, and a rare din they made of it. There was nothing but, 
Hail ! fellow Day, — well met — brother Day — sister Day — only 
Lady Day kept a little on the aloof, and seemed somewhat scorr - 
ful. Yet some said, Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for she 
came in a tiffany suit, white and gold, like a green on a frost- 
cake, all royal, glittering, and Epiphanous. The rest came, 
some in green, some in white — but old Lent and his family wei e 
not yet out of mourning. Rainy Days came in, dripping ; and 
sun-shiny Days helped them to change their stockings. Wedding 
Day was there in his marriage finery, a little4*he worse for wear. 
Pay Day came late, as he always does ; and Doomsday sent word 
— he might be expected. 

April Fool (as my young lord's jester) took upon himself to 
marshal the guests, and wild work he made with it. It would 
have posed old Erra Pater to have found out any given Day in the 
year, to erect a scheme upon — good Days, bad Days, were so 
shuffled together, to the confounding of all sober horoscopy. 

He had stuck the Twenty-First of June next to the Twenty- 
Second of December, and the former looked like a Maypole siding 
a marrow-bone. Ash Wednesday got wedged in (as was con- 
certed) betwixt Christmas and Lord Mayor's Day. Lord ! how 
he laid about him ! Nothing but barons of beef and turkeys 
would go down with him — to the great greasing and detriment of 
his new sackcloth bib and tucker. And still Christmas Day was 
at his elbow, plying him with the wassail-bowl, till he roared, and 
hiccupp'd, and protested there was no faith in dried ling, but 
commended it to the devil for a sour, windy, acrimonious, censo- 
rious, hy-pocrit-crit-critical mess, and no dish for a gentleman. 
Then he dipt his fist into the middle of the great custard that 
stood before his left-hand neighbor, and daubed his hungry beard 
all over with it, till you would have taken him for the Last Day 
in December, it so hung in icicles. 

At another part of the table, Shrove Tuesday was helping the 
Second of September to some cock broth, — which courtesy the 
latter returned with the delicate thigh of a hen pheasant — so there 
was no love lost for that matter. The Last of Lent was sponging 
upon Shrovetide's pancake ; which April Fool perceiving, told 
him he did well, pancakes were proper to a good fry -day. 



REJOICING UPON THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. Sll 

In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth of January, 
who, it seems, being a sour puritanic character, that thought no- 
body's meat good or sanctified enough for him, had smuggled into 
the room a calf's head, which he had had cooked at home for that 
purpose, thinking to feast thereon incontinently ; but as it lay in 
the dish March Many weathers , who is a very fine lady, and 
subject to the meagrims, screamed out there was a " human head 
in the platter," and raved about Herodias' daughter to that degree, 
that the obnoxious viand was obliged to be removed ; nor did she 
recover her stomach till she had gulped down a Restorative, 
confected of Oak Apple, which the merry Twenty-Ninth of May 
always carries about with him for that purpose. 

The King's health* being called for after this, a notable dispute 
arose between the Twelfth of August (a zealous old Whig gentle- 
woman), and the Twenty-Third of April (a new-fangled lady 
of the Tory stamp), as to which of them should have the honor to 
propose it. August grew hot upon the matter, affirming time out 
of mind the prescriptive right to have lain with her, till her rival 
had basely supplanted her ; whom she represented as little better 
than a kept mistress, who went about in fine clothes, while she 
(the legitimate Birthday) had scarcely a rag, &c. 

April Fool, being made mediator, confirmed the right in the 
strongest form of words to the appellant, but decided for peace' 
sake that the exercise of it should remain with the present posses- 
sor. At the same time, he slily rounded the first lady in the ear^ 
that an action might lie against the Crown for bi-geny. 

It beginning to grow a little duskish, Candlemas lustily -bawled 
out for lights, which was opposed by all the Days, who protested 
against burning daylight. Then fair water was handed round in 
silver ewers, and the same lady was observed to take an unusual 
time in Washing herself. 

May Bay, with that sweetness which fs peculiar to her, in a 
neat speech proposing the health of the founder, crowned her 
goblet (and by her example the rest of the company) with gar- 
lands. This being done, the lordly New Year from the upper 
end of the table, in a cordial but somewhat lofty tone, returned 

* King George IV. 



812 ELIA. 

thanks. He felt proud on an occasion of meeting so many of his 
worthy father's late tenants, promised to improve their farms, and 
at the same time to abate (if anything was found unreasonable) in 
their rents. 

At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days involuntarily 
looked at each other, and smiled ; April Fool whistled to an old 
tune of " New Brooms ; M and a surly old rebel at the further end 
of the table (who was discovered to be no other than the Fifth of 
November) muttered out, distinctly enough to be heard by the 
whole company, words to this effect, that, " when the old one is 
gone, he is a fool that looks for a better." Which rudeness of 
his, the guests resenting, unanimously voted his expulsion ; and 
the malcontent was thrust out neck and heels into the cellar, as 
the properest place for such a boutefeu and firebrand as he had 
shown himself to be. 

Order being restored — the young lord (who, to say truth, had 
been a little ruffled, and put beside his oratory) in as few, and yet 
as obliging words as possible, assured them of entire welcome ; 
and, with a graceful turn, singling out poor Twenty-Ninth of 
February, that had sate all this while mumchance at the side- 
board, begged to couple his health with that of the good company 
before him — which he drank accordingly ; observing, that he had 
not seen his honest face any time these four years — with a num- 
ber of endearing expressions besides. At the same time, remov- 
ing the solitary Day from the forlorn seat which had been 
assigned him, he stationed him at his own board, somewhere 
between the Greek Calends and Latter Lammas. 

Ash Wednesday, being now called upon for a song, with his 
eyes fast stuck in his head, and as well as the Canary he had 
swallowed would give him leave, struck up a Carol, which Christ- 
mas Day had taught him for the nonce ; and was followed by the 
latter, who gave " Miserere " in fine style, hitting off the mump- 
ing notes and lengthened drawl of Old Mortification with infinite 
humor. April Fool swore they had exchanged conditions; but 
Good Friday was observed to look extremely grave ; and Sunday 
held her fan before her face, that she might not be seen to 
smile. 



REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. 813 

Shrove-tide, Lord Mayor's Day, and April Fool, next joined in 
a glee — 

Which is the properest day to drink ? 

in which all the Days chiming in, made a merry burden. 

They next fell to quibbles and conundrums. The question 
being proposed, who had the greatest number of followers — the 
Quarter Days said, there could be no question as to that ; for they 
had all the creditors in the world dogging their heels. But April 
Fool gave it in favor of the Forty Days before Easter ; because 
the debtors in all cases outnumbered the creditors, and they kept 
lent all the year. 

All this while Valentine's Day kept courting pretty May, who 
sate next him, slipping amorous billets-doux under the table, till 
the Dog Days (who are naturally of a warm constitution) began 
to be jealous, and to bark and rage exceedingly. April Fool, who 
likes a bit of sport above measure, and had some pretensions to 
the lady besides, as being but a cousin once removed, — -clapped 
and halloo'd them on ; and as fast as their indignation cooled, 
those mad wags, the Ember Days, were at it with their bellows, 
to blow it into a flame ; and all was in a ferment : till old Madam 
Septuagesima (who boasts herself the Mother of the Days) wisely 
diverted the conversation with a tedious tale of the lovers which 
she could reckon when she was young ; and of one Master Roga- 
tion Day in particular, who was for ever putting the question to 
her ; but she kept him at a distance, as the chronicle would tell — 
by which I apprehend she meant the Almanack. Then she ram- 
bled on to the Days that were gone, the good old Days, and so to 
the Days before the Flood — which plainly showed her old head to 
be little better than crazed and doited. 

Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks and great- 
coats, and took their leaves. Lord Mayor's Day went off in a 
Mist, as usual ; Shortest Day in a deep black Fog, that wrapt the 
little gentleman all round like a hedge-hog. Two Vigils — so 
watchmen are called in heaven — saw Christmas Day safe home — 
they had been used to the business before. Another Vigil — a 
stout, sturdy patrole, called the Eve of St. Christopher — seeing 



3U ELIA 

Ash Wednesday in a condition little better than he should be— e'en 
whipt him over his shoulders, piek-a-back fashion, and Old Mor- 
tification went floating home singing — 

On the bat's back do I fly, 

and a number of old snatches besides, between drunk and sober ; 
but very few Aves or Penitentiaries (you may believe me) were 
among them. Longest Day set off westward in beautiful crimson 
and gold — the rest, some in one fashion, some in another ; but 
Valentine and pretty May took their departure together in one of 
the prettiest silvery twilights <a Lover's Day could wish to set in. 






CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 315 



CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 



Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favor- 
ite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received 
with abundance of applause by water-drinking critics. But with 
the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortunately their 
sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil is acknowledged, the 
remedy simple. Abstain. No force can oblige a man to raise 
the glass to his head against his will. 'Tis as easy as not to steal, 
not to tell lies. 

Alas ! the hand to pilfer, and the tongue to bear false witness, 
have no constitutional tendency. These are actions indifferent to 
them. At the first instance of the reformed will, they can be 
brought off without a murmur. The itching finger is but a figure 
in speech, and the tongue of the liar can with the same natural 
delight give forth useful truths with which it has been accustomed 
to scatter their pernicious contraries. But when a man has com- 
menced sot 

O pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout nerves and 
a strong head, whose liver is happily untouched, and ere thy gorge 
riseth at the name which I have written, first learn what the thing 
is ; how much of compassion, how much of human allowance, 
thou mayst virtuously mingle with thy disapprobation. Trample 
not on the ruins of man. Exact not, under so terrible a penalty 
as infamy, a resuscitation from a state of death almost as real as 
that from which Lazarus rose not but by a miracle. 

Begin a reformation, and custom will make it easy. But what 
if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not like climbing a 
mountain but going through fire ? what if the whole system must 
undergo a change violent as that which we conceive of the muta- 



316 . ELIA. 

tion of form in some insects ? what if a process comparable to 
flaying alive be to be gone through ? is the weakness that sinks 
under such struggles to be confounded with the pertinacity which 
clings to other vices, which have induced no constitutional neces- 
sity, no engagement of the whole victim, body and soul ? 

I have known one in that state, when he has tried to abstain 
but for one evening, — though the poisonous potion had long ceased 
to bring back its first enchantments, though he was sure it would 
rather deepen his gloom than brighten it, — in the violence of the 
struggle, and the necessity he has felt of getting rid of the present 
sensation at any rate, I have known him to scream out, to cry 
aloud, for the anguish and pain of the strife within him. 

Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak 
is myself? I have no puling apology to make to mankind. I see 
them all in one way or another deviating from the pure reason. 
It is to my own nature alone I am accountable for the wo that I 
have brought upon it. 

I believe that there are constitutions, robust "heads and iron in- 
sides, whom scarce any excesses can hurt ; whom brandy (I have 
seen them drink it like wine), at all events whom wine, taken in 
ever so plentiful measure, can do no worse injury to than just to 
muddle their faculties, perhaps never very pellucid. On them 
this discourse is wasted. They would but laugh at a weak bro- 
ther, who trying his strength with them, and coming off foiled from 
the contest, would fain persuade them that such agonistic exer- 
cises are dangerous. It is to a very different description of per- 
sons I speak. It is to the weak, the nervous ; to those who feel 
the want of some artificial aid to raise their spirits in society to 
what is no more than the ordinary pitch of all around them with- 
out it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such must fly the 
convivial board in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell 
themselves for term of life. 

Twelve years ago I had completed my six-and-twentieth year. 
I had lived from the period of leaving school to that time pretty 
much in solitude. My companions were chiefly books, or at most 
one or two living ones of my own book-loving and sober stamp. 
I rose early, went to bed betimes, and the faculties which God 
had given me, I have reason to think, did not rust in me unused. 



CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 317 

About that time I fell in with some companions of a different 
order. They were men of boisterous spirits, sitters up a-nights, 
disputants, drunken ; yet seemed to .have something noble about 
them. We dealt about the wit, or what passes for it after mid- 
night, jovially. Of the quality called fancy I certainly possessed 
a larger share than my companions. Encouraged by their ap- 
plause, I set up for a professed joker ! I, who of all men am 
least fitted for such an occupation, having, in addition to the 
greatest difficulty which I experience at all times of finding 
words to express my meaning, a natural nervous impediment in 
my speech ! 

Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any 
character but that of a wit. When you find a tickling relish 
upon your tongue disposing you to that sort of conversation, es- 
pecially if you find a preternatural flow of ideas setting in upon 
you at the sight of a bottle and fresh glasses, avoid giving way to 
it as you would fly your greatest destruction. If you cannot 
crush the power of fancy, or that within you which you mistake 
for such, divert it, give it some other play. Write an essay, pen 
a character or description, — but not as I do now, with tears trick- 
ling down your cheeks. 

To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes ; to 
be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools ; to be esteemed dull 
when you cannot be witty, to be applauded for witty when you 
know that you have been dull ; to be called upon for the extem- 
poraneous exercise of that faculty which no premeditation can 
give ; to be spurred on to efforts which end in contempt ; to be 
set on to provoke mirth which procures the procurer hatred ; to 
give pleasure and be paid with squinting malice ; to swallow 
draughts of life-destroying wine which are to be distilled into airy 
breath to tickle vain auditors ; to mortgage miserable morrows 
for nights of madness ; to waste whole seas of time upon those 
who pay it back in little inconsiderable drops of grudging ap- 
plause, — are the wages of buffoonery and death. 

Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving all connexions 
which have no solider fastening than this liquid cement, more 
kind to me than my own taste or penetration, at length opened my 
eyes to the supposed qualities of my first friends. No trace of 



318 ELIA. 

them is left but in the vices which they introduced, and the habits 
they infixed. In them my friends survive still, and exercise am- 
ple retribution for any supposed infidelity that I may have been 
guilty of towards them. 

My next more immediate companions were and are persons of 
such intrinsic and felt worth, that though accidentally their ac- 
quaintance has proved pernicious to me, I do not know that if the 
thing were to do over again, I should have the courage to eschew 
the mischief at the price of forfeiting the benefit. I came to them 
reeking from the steams of my late over-heated notions of com- 
panionship ; and the slightest fuel which they unconsciously 
afforded, was sufficient to feed my old fires into a propensity. 

They were no drinkers, but, one from professional habits, and 
another from a custom derived from his father, smoked tobacco. 
The devil could not have devised a more subtle trap to re-take a 
backsliding penitent. The transition, from gulping down 
draughts of liquid fire to puffing out innocuous blasts of dry smoke, 
was so like cheating him. But he is too hard for us when we 
hope to commute. He beats us at barter ; and when we think to 
set off a new failing against an old infirmity, 'tis odds but he puts 
the trick upon us of two for one. That (comparatively) white 
devil of tobacco brought with him in the end seven worse than 
himself. 

It were impertinent to carry the reader through all the processes 
by which, from smoking at first with malt liquor, I took my de- 
grees through thin wines, through stronger wine and water, through 
small punch, to those juggling compositions, which, under the name 
of mixed liquors, slur a great deal of brandy or other poison under 
less and less water continually, until they come next to none, and 
so to none at all . But it is hateful to disclose the secrets of my 
Tartarus. 

I should repel my readers, from a mere incapacity of believi 
me, were I to tell them what tobacco has been to me, the drudg- 
ing service which I have paid, the slavery which I have vowed to 
it. How, when I have resolved to quit it, a feeling as of ingrati- 
tude has started up ; how it has put on personal claims and made 
the demands of a friend upon me. How the reading of it casu- 
ally in a book, as where Adams takes his whiff in the chimney- 



CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 319 

corner of some inn in Joseph Andrews, or Piscator in the Complete 
Angler breaks his fast upon a morning pipe in that delicate room 
Piscatoribus Sacrum, has in a moment broken down the resistance 
of weeks. How a pipe was ever in my midnight path before me, 
till the vision forced me to realize it, — how then its ascending va- 
pors curled, its fragrance lulled, and the thousand delicious min- 
isterings conversant about it, employing every faculty, extracted 
the sense of pain. How from illuminating it came to darken, 
from a quick solace it turned to a negative relief, thence to a 
restlessness and dissatisfaction, thence to a positive misery. How, 
even now, when the whole secret stands confessed in all its dread- 
ful truth before me, I feel myself linked to it beyond the power 
of revocation. Bone of my bone 

Persons not accustomed to examine the motives of their actions, 
to reckon up the countless nails that rivet the chains of habit, or 
perhaps being bound by none so obdurate as those I have confess- 
ed to, may recoil from this as from an overcharged picture. But 
what short of such a bondage is it, which in spite of protesting 
friends, a weeping wife, and a reprobating world, chains down 
many a poor fellow, of no original indisposition to goodness, to his 
pipe and his pot ! 

I have seen a print after Correggio, in which three female fig- 
ures are ministering to a man who sits fast bound at the root of a 
tree. Sensuality is soothing him, Evil Habit is nailing him to 
a branch, and Repugnance at the same instant of time is applying 
a snake to his side. In his face is feeble delight, the recollection 
of past rather than perception of present pleasures, languid en- 
joyment of evil with utter imbecility to good, a Sybaritic effemi- 
nacy, a submission to bondage, the springs of the will gone down 
like a broken clock, the sin and the suffering co-instantaneous, or 
the latter forerunning the former, remorse preceding action — all 
this represented in one point of time. When I saw this, I admir- 
ed the wonderful skill of the painter. But when I went away, I 
wept, because I thought of my own condition. 

Of that there is no hope that it should ever change. The wa- 
ters have gone over me. But out of the black depths could I be 
heard, I would cry out to all those who have but set a foot in the 
perilous flood. Could the youth, to whom the flavor of his first 



320 ELIA. 

wine is delicious as the opening scenes of life or the entering upon 
some newly discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and be 
made to understand what a dreary thing it is when a man shall 
feel himself going down a precipice with open eyes and a passive 
will, — to see his destruction and have no power to stop it, and yet 
to feel it all the way emanating from himself; to perceive all 
goodness emptied out of him, and yet not to be able to forget a 
time when it was otherwise ; to bear about the piteous spectacle 
of his own self-ruins : — could he see my fevered eye, feverish with 
last night's drinking, and feverishly looking for this night's repe- 
tition of the folly ; could he feel the body of the death out of 
which I cry hourly with feebler and feebler outcry to be deliver- 
ed, — it were enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage 
to the earth in all the pride of its mantling temptation ; to make 
him clasp his teeth, 

and not undo 'em 
To suffer wet Damnation to run thro' 'em. 

Yes, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if sobriety be that 
fine thing you would have us to understand, if the comforts of a 
cool brain are to be preferred to that state of heated excitement 
which you describe and deplore, what hinders in your own in- 
stance that \ou do not return to those habits from which you 
would induce others never to swerve ? if the blessing be worth 
preserving, is it not worth recovering ? * 

Recovering ! — O if a wish could transport me back to those 
days of youth, when a draught from the next clear spring could 
slake any heats which summer suns and youthful exercise had 
power to stir up in the blood, how gladly would I return to thee, 
pure element, the drink of children, and of child-like holy her- 
mit ! In my dreams I can sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment 
purling over my burning tongue. But my waking stomach 
rejects it. That which refreshes innocence only makes me sick 
and faint. 

But is there no middle way betwixt total abstinence and the ex- 
cess which kills you ? For your sake, reader, and that you may 
never attain to my experience, with pain I must utter the dread- 
ful truth, that there is none, none that I can find. In my stage 






CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 321 

of habit (I speak not of habits less confirmed — for some of them 
I believe the advice to be most prudential) in the stage which I 
have reached, to stop short of that measure which is sufficient to 
draw on torpor and sleep, the benumbing apoplectic sleep of the 
drunkard, is to have taken none at all. The pain of the self-de- 
nial is all one. And what that is, I had rather the reader should 
believe on my credit, than know from his own trial. He will 
come to know it, whenever he shall arrive at that state, in which, 
paradoxical as it may appear, reason shall only visit him through 
intoxication : for it is a fearful truth, that the intellectual faculties 
by repeated acts of intemperance may be driven from their or- 
derly sphere of action, their clear daylight ministeries, until they 
shall be brought at last to depend, for the faint manifestation of 
their departing energies, upon the returning periods of the fatal 
madness to which they owe their devastation. The drinking man 
is never less himself than during his sober intervals. Evil is so 
far his good.* 

Behold me then, in the robust period of life, reduced to imbe- 
cility and decay. Hear me count my gains, and the profit which 
I have derived from the midnight cup. 

Twelve years ago, I was possessed of a healthy frame of mind 
and body. I was never strong, but I think my constitution (for 
a weak one) was as happily exempt from the tendency to any 
malady as it was possible to be. I scarce knew what it was to 
ail anything. Now, except when I am losing myself in a sea of 
drink, I am never free from these uneasy sensations in head and 
stomach, which are so much worse to bear than any definite pains 
or aches. 

At that time I was seldom in bed after six in the morning, 
summer and winter. I awoke refreshed, and seldom without 
some merry thoughts in my head, or some piece of a song to 
welcome the new-born day. Now, the first feeling which besets 

* When poor M painted his last picture, with a pencil in one trem- 
bling hand, and a glass of brandy and water in the other, his fingers owed 
the comparative steadiness with which they were enabled to go through 
their task in an imperfect manner, to a temporary firmness derived from a 
repetition of practices, the general effect of which had shaken both them 
and him so terriblv. 

22 



322 ELIA. 

me, after stretching out the hours of recumbence to their last 
possible extent, is a forecast of the wearisome day that lies before 
me, with a secret wish that I could have lain on still, or never 
awaked. • 

Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, the 
trouble, and obscure perplexity, of an ill dream. In the day 
time I stumble upon dark mountains. 

Business, which, though never very particularly adapted to my 
nature, yet as something of necessity to be gone through, and 
therefore best undertaken with cheerfulness, I used to enter upon 
with some degree of alacrity, now wearies, affrights, perplexes 
me. I fancy all sorts of discouragements, and am ready to give 
up an occupation which gives me bread, from a harrassing conceit 
of incapacity. The slightest commission given me by a friend, 
or any small duty which I have to perform for myself, as giving 
orders to a tradesman, &c, haunts me as a labor impossible to 
be got through. So much the springs of action are broken. 

The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse with 
mankind. I dare not promise that a friend's honor, or his cause, 
would be safe in my keeping, if I were put to the expense of any 
manly resolution in defending it. So much the springs of moral 
action are deadened within me. 

My favorite occupations in times past now cease to entertain. 
I can do nothing readily. Application for ever so short a time 
kills me. This poor abstract of my condition was penned at long 
intervals, with scarcely any attempt at connection of thought, 
which is now difficult to me. 

The noble passages which formerly delighted me in history or 
poetic fiction, now only draw a few weak tears, allied to dotage. 
My broken and dispirited nature seems to sink before anything 
great and admirable. 

I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause, or none. 
It is inexpressible how much this infirmity adds to a sense of 
shame, and a general feeling of deterioration. 

These are some of the instances, concerning which I can say 
with truth, that it was not always so with me. 

Shall I lift up the veil of my weakness any further ? or is this 
disclosure sufficient ? 



CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 323 

I am a poor nameless egotist, who have no vanity to consult 
by these Confessions. I know not whether I shall be laughed at, 
or heard seriously. Such as they are, I commend them to the 
reader's attention, if he find his own case any way touched. I 
have told him what I am come to. Let him stop in time. 



324 ELIA. 



OLD CHINA. 



I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go 
to see any great house, I inquire for the china-closet, and next for 
the picture gallery. I cannot defend the order of preference, but 
by saying, that we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a 
date to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an ac- 
quired one. I can call to mind the first play, and the first 
exhibition, that I was taken to ; but I am not conscious of a time 
when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination. 

I had no repugnance then — why should I now have 1 — to those 
little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion 
of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, 
in that world before perspective — a china tea-cup. 

I like to see my old friends — whom distance cannot diminish — 
figuring up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on terra 
firma still — for so we must in . courtesy interpret that speck of 
deeper blue, — which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, had 
made to spring up beneath their sandals. 

I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if possi- 
ble, with still more womanish expressions. 

Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady 
from a salver — two miles off. See how distance seems to set off 
respect ! And here the same lady, or another — for likeness is 
identity on tea-cups — is stepping into a little fairy boat, moored 
on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a dainty minc- 
ing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our 
world) must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead — 
a furlong off on the other side of the same strange stream ! 

Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of their world — 
see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays. 



OLD CHINA. 325 

Here — a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-extensive — so objects 
show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay. 

I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson 
(which we are old-fashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an 
afternoon) some of these speciosa miracula upon a set of extraor- 
dinary old blue china (a recent purchase) which we were now 
for the first time using ; and could riot help remarking, how favor- 
able circumstances had been to us of late years, that we could 
afford to please the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort — when 
a passing sentiment seemed to overshade the brows of my com- 
panion. I am quick at detecting these summer clouds in Bridget. 

" I wish the good old times would come again," she said, " when 
we were not quite so rich. I do not mean, that I want to be 
poor ; but there was a middle state " — so she was pleased to 
ramble on, — u in which I am sure we were a great deal happier. 
A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have money enough 
and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we 
coveted a cheap luxury (and, O ! how much ado I had to get 
you to consent in those times !) — we were used to have a debate 
two or three days before, and to weigh the for and against, and 
think what we might spare it out of, and what saving we could 
hit upon, that should be an equivalent. A thing was worth buy- 
ing then, when we felt the money that we paid for it. 

" Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang 
upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so 
thread-bare — and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, 
which you dragged home late at night *from Barker's in Co vent- 
Garden ? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before 
we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come 
to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday 
night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too 
late — and when the old book-seller with some grumbling opened 
his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bed- 
wards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures — and when 
you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome — and 
when you presented it to me — and when we were exploring the 
perfectness of it [collating you called it) — and while I was re- 
pairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impa- 



326 ELIA. 

tience would not suffer to be left till daybreak — was there no 
pleasure in being a poor man ? or can those neat black clothes 
which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since 
we have become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity, 
with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit — your old 
corbeau — for four or five weeks longer than you should have 
done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen — or 
sixteen shillings was it ? — a great affair we thought it then — 
which you had lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to 
buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever 
bring me home any nice old purchases now. 

" When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a 
less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo, which we 
christened the c Lady Blanch ;' when you looked at the pur- 
chase, and thought of the money — and thought of the money, 
and looked again at the picture — was there no pleasure in being 
a poor man ? Now, you have nothing to do but to walk into Col- 
naghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you ? 

" Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and 
Potter's bar, and Waltham, when we had a holiday — holidays, 
and all other fun, are gone now we are rich — and the little hand- 
basket in which I used to deposit our day's fare of savory cold 
lamb and salad — and how you would pry about at noon-tide for 
some decent house, where we might go in and produce our store 
— only paying for the ale that you must call for — and speculate 
upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to 
allow us a table-cloth — and wish for such another honest hostess, 
as Izaak Walton has described many a one on the pleasant banks 
of the Lea, when he went a fishing — and sometimes they would 
prove obliging enough, and sometimes they would look grudgingly 
upon us — but we had cheerful looks still for one another, and 
would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely grudging Piscator his 
Trout Hall ? Now — when we go out a day's pleasuring, which 
is seldom moreover, we ride part of the way — and go into a fine 
inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense— 
which after all never has half the relish of those chance country 
snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a 
precarious welcome. 



OLD CHINA. 327 

" You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the 
pit. Do you remember where it was we used to sit, when we 
saw the Battle of Hexham, and the surrender of Calais, and 
Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the Wood — when 
we squeezed out our shillings a-piece to sit three or four times in 
a season in the one-shilling gallery — where you felt all the time 
that you ought not to have brought me — and more strongly I felt 
obligation to you for having brought me — and the pleasure was 
the better for a little shame — and when the curtain drew up, what 
cared we for our place in the house, or what mattered it where 
we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, 
or with Viola at the Court of Illyria ? You used to say, that the 
Gallery was the best place of all for enjoying a play socially — 
that the relish of such exhibitions must be in proportion to the 
infrequency of going — that the company we met there, not being 
in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and 
did attend, to what was going on, on the stage — because a word 
lost would have been a chasm, which it was impossible for them 
to fill up. With such reflections we consoled our pride then — 
and I appeal to you, whether, as a woman, I met generally with 
less attention and accommodation, than I have done since in more 
expensive situations in the house ? The getting in indeed, and 
the crowding up those inconvenient staircases, was bad enough, — 
but there was still a law of civility to woman recognized to quite 
as great an extent as we ever found in the other passages — and 
how a little difficulty overcome heightened the snug seat and the 
play, afterwards ! Now we can only pay our money and walk 
in. You cannot see, you say, in the galleries now. I am sure 
we saw, and heard too, well enough then — but sight, and all I 
think, is gone with our poverty. 

<< There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before they became 
quite common — in the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear 
— to have them for a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have 
now ? If we were to treat ourselves now — that is, to have dainties 
a little above our means, it would be selfish and wicked. It is the 
very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual 
poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat — when two people 
living together, as we have done, now and then indulge them- 



328 ELIA. 

selves in a cheap luxury, which both like ; while each apologises, 
and is willing to take both halves of the blame to his single share. 
I see no harm in people making much of themselves, in that 
sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make much 
of others. But now — what I mean by the word — we never do 
make much of ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do 
not mean the veriest poor of .all, but persons as we were, just 
above poverty. 

" I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant 
at the end of the year to make all meet — and much ado we used 
to have every Thirty-first Night of December to account for our 
exceedings — many a long face did you make over your puzzled 
accounts, and in contriving to make it out how we had spent so 
much — or that we had not spent so much— or that it was impos- 
sible we should spend so much next year — and still we found our 
slender capital decreasing — but then, betwixt ways, and projects, 
and compromises of one sort or another, and talk of curtailing 
this charge, and doing without that for the future — and the hope 
that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you were never 
poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion, with 
1 lusty brimmers ' (as you used to quote it out of hearty cheerful 
Mr. Cotton, as you called him), we used to welcome in the ' com- 
ing guest. 5 Now we have no reckoning at all at the end of the 
old year — no flattering promises about the new year doing better 
for us. 55 

Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that 
when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt 
it. I could not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth 
which her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear income 
of poor hundred pounds a year. " It is true we were hap- 
pier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. 
I am afraid we must put up with the excess, for if we were to 
shake the superflux into the sea, we should not much mend our- 
selves. That we had much to struggle with, as we grew up 
together, we have reason to be most thankful. It strengthened, 
and knit our compact closer. We could never have been what 
we have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency 
which you now complain of. The resisting power — those natural 



OLD CHINA. 329 

dilations of the youthful spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten 
— with us are long since passed away. Competence to age is 
supplementary youth, a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the 
best that is to be had. We must ride where we formerly walked 
— live better and lie softer — and shall be wise to do so — than we 
had means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could 
those days return — could you and I once more walk our thirty 
miles a day — could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, 
and you and I be young to see them — could the good old one-shil- 
ling gallery days return — they are dreams, my cousin, now — but 
could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, 
by our well-carpeted fire-side, sitting on this luxurious sofa — be 
once more struggling up those inconvenient stair-cases, pushed 
about, and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor 
gallery scramblers — could I once more hear those anxious 
shrieks of yours — and the delicious Thank God, we are safe, which 
always followed when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first 
light of the cheerful theatre down beneath us — I know not the 
fathom line th.at ever touched a descent so deep as I would be 
willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had, or the great 

Jew R is supposed to have, to purchase it. And now do 

just look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, 
big enough for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty insipid 
half Madona-ish chit of a lady in that very blue summer-house." 



330 ELIA. 



THE CHILD ANGEL; A DREAM. 



I chanced upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing of a 
dream the other night, that you shall hear of. I had been 
reading the " Loves of the Angels/' and went to bed with my 
head full of speculations, suggested by that extraordinary legend. 
It had given birth to innumerable conjectures ; and I remember 
the last waking thought, which I gave expression to on my pil- 
low, was a sort of wonder " what could come of it.' 5 

I was suddenly transported, how or whither I could scarcely 
make out — but to some celestial region. It was not the real 
heavens neither — not the downright Bible heaven — but a kind 
of fairy-land heaven, about which a poor human fancy may have 
leave to sport and air itself, I will hope, without presumption. 

Methought — what wild things dreams are ? — I was present — 
at what would you imagine — at an angel's gossipping. 

Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it come, or whe- 
ther it came purely of its own head, neither you nor I know — but 
there lay, sure enough, wrapt in its little cloudy swaddling-bands 
— a Child Angel. 

Sun-threads — filmy beams — ran through the celestial napery 
of what seemed its princely cradle. All the winged orders 
hovered round, watching when the new-born should open its yet 
closed eyes ; which, when it did, first one, and then the other — 
with a solicitude and apprehension, yet not such as, stained with 
fear, dim the expanding eyelids of mortal infants, but as if to 
explore its path in those its unhereditary palaces — what an inex- 
tinguishable titter that time spared not celestial visages ! Nor 
wanted there to my seeming — O the inexplicable simpleness of 
dreams ! — bowls of that cheering nectar, 



— which mortals caudle call below. 



THE CHILD ANGEL; A DREAM. 331 

Nor were wanting faces of female ministrants — stricken in years, 
as it might seem — so dexterous were those heavenly attendants 
to counterfeit kindly similitudes of earth, to greet, with terres- 
trial child-rites the young present, which earth had made to 
heaven. 

Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full symphony as 
those by which the spheres are tutored ; but, as loudest instru- 
ments on earth speak oftentimes muffled ; so to accommodate 
their sound the better to the weak ears of the imperfect-born. 
And, with the noise of those subdued soundings, the Angelet 
sprang forth, fluttering its rudiments of pinions — but forthwith 
flagged and was recovered into the arms of those full-winged an- 
gels. And a wonder it was to see how, as years went round in 
heaven — a year in dreams is as a day — continually its white 
shoulders put forth buds of wings, but wanting the perfect angelic 
nutriment, anon was shorn of its aspiring, and fell fluttering — 
still caught by angel hands — for ever to put forth shoots, and to 
fall fluttering, because its birth was not of the unmixed vigor of 
heaven. 

And a name was given to the Babe Angel, and it was to 
be called Ge-Urania, because its production was of earth and 
heaven. 

And it could not taste of death, by reason of its adoption into 
immortal palaces : but it was to know weakness, and reliance, 
and the shadow of human imbecility ; and it went with a lame 
gait ; but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace 
and swiftness. Then pity first sprang up in angelic bosoms ; 
and yearnings (like the human) touched them at the sight of the 
immortal lame one. 

And with pain did then first those Intuitive Essences, with pain 
and strife, to their natures (not grief), put back their bright intel- 
ligences, and reduce their ethereal minds, schooling them to 
degrees and slower processes, so to adapt their lessons to the 
gradual illumination (as must needs be) of the half-earth-born ; 
and what intuitive notices they could not repel (by reason that 
their nature is to know all things at once) the half-heavenly 
novice, by the better part of its nature, aspired to receive into its 



332 ELIA. 

understanding ; so that Humility and Aspiration went on even- 
paced in the instruction of the glorious Amphibium. 

But, by reason that Mature Humanity is too gross to breathe 
the air of that super-subtile region, its portion was, and is,4o be a 
child for ever. 

And because the human part of it might not press into the 
heart and inwards of the palace of its adoption, those full-natured 
angels tended it by turns in the purlieus of the palace, where 
were shady groves and rivulets, like this green earth from which 
it came : so Love, with Voluntary Humility, waited upon the 
entertainment of the new-adopted. 

And myriads of years rolled round (in dreams Time is no- 
thing), and still it kept, and is to keep, perpetual childhood, and is 
the Tutelar Genius of Childhood upon earth, and still goes lame 
and lovely. 

By the banks of the river Pison is seen, lone sitting by the 
grave of the terrestrial Adah, whom the angel Nadir loved, a 
Child ; but not the same which I saw in heaven. A mournful 
hue overcasts its lineaments ; nevertheless, a correspondency is 
between the child by the grave, and that celestial orphan, whom 
I saw above ; and the dimness of the grief upon the heavenly, is 
a shadow or emblem of that which stains the beauty of the ter- 
restrial. And this correspondency is not to be understood but by 
dreams. 

And in the archives of heaven I had grace to read, how that 
once the angel Nadir, being exiled from his place for mortal 
passion, upspringing on the wings of parental love (such power 
had parental love for a moment to suspend the else-irrevocable 
law), appeared for a brief instant in his station, and, depositing a 
wondrous Birth, straightway disappeared, and the palaces knew 
him no more. And this charge was the self-same Babe, who 
goeth lame and lovely — but Adah sleepeth by the river Pison. 



POPULAR FALLACIES 333 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 



THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD. 

This axiom contains a principle of compensation, which disposes 
us to admit the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to dic- 
tionaries and definitions. We should more willingly fall in with 
this popular language, if we did not find brutality sometimes 
awkwardly coupled with valor in the same vocabulary. The 
comic writers, with their poetical justice, have contributed not a 
little to mislead us upon this point. To see a hectoring fellow 
exposed and beaten upon the stage, has something in it wonder- 
fully diverting. Some people's share of animal spirits is notori- 
ously low and defective. It has not strength to raise a vapor, or 
furnish out the wind of a tolerable bluster. These love to be told 
that huffing is no part of valor. The truest courage with them 
is that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. But confront one 
of these silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, and his 
confidence in the theory quickly vanishes. Pretensions do not 
uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest inoffensive de- 
portment does not necessarily imply valor ; neither does the 
absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hickman wanted 
modesty — we do not mean him of Clarissa — but who ever doubted 
his courage ? Even the poets — upon whom this equitable distri- 
bution of qualities should be most binding — have thought it 
agreeable to nature to depart from the rule upon occasion. 
Harapha, in the " Agonistes," is indeed a bully upon the received 
notions. Milton has made him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a 
dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies 



334 ELIA. 

singly before him — and does it. Tom Brown has a shrewder 
insight into this kind of character than either of his predecessors. 
He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a sort of 
dimidiate pre-eminence : — " Bully Dawson kicked by half the 
town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson." This was 
true distributive justice. 



II. 

THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS. 

The weakest part of mankind have this saying commonest in 
their mouth. It is the trite consolation administered to the easy 
dupe, when he has been tricked out of his money or estate, that 
the acquisition of it will do the owner no good. But the rogues 
of this world— the prudenter part of them, at least — know better ; 
and if the observation had been as true as it is old, would not 
have failed by this time to have discovered it. They have pretty 
sharp distinctions of the fluctuating and the permanent. " Lightly 
come, lightly go/' is a proverb, which they can very well afford 
to leave, when they leave little else, to the losers. They do not 
always find manors, got by rapine or chicanery, insensible to melt 
away, as the poets will have it ; or that all gold glides, like thaw- 
ing snow, from the thief's hand that grasps it. Church land, 
alienated to lay uses, was formerly denounced to have this slip- 
pery quality. But some portions of it somehow always stuck so 
fast, that the denunciators have been fain to postpone the prophecy 
of refundment to a late posterity. 



III. 

THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST. 

The severest exaction surely ever invented upon the self-denial 
of poor human nature ! This is to expect a gentleman to give a 






POPULAR FALLACIES. 335 

treat without partaking of it ; to sit esurient at his own table, and 
commend the flavor of his venison upon the absurd strength of his 
never touching it himself. On the contrary, we love to see a wag 
taste his own joke to his party ; to watch a quirk or a merry 
conceit flickering upon the lips some seconds before the tongue is 
delivered of it. If it be good, fresh, and racy — begotten of the 
occasion ; if he that utters it never thought it before, he is natu- 
rally the first to be tickled with it ; and any suppression of such 
complacency we hold to be churlish and insulting. What does 
it seem to imply, but that your company is weak or foolish 
enough to be moved by an image or a fancy, that shall stir you 
not at all, or but faintly ? This is exactly the humor of the fine 
gentleman in Mandeville, who, while he dazzles his guests with 
the display of some costly toy, affects himself to "see nothing 
considerable in it." 



IV. 



THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING. — THAT IT IS EASY TO 
PERCEIVE HE IS NO GENTLEMAN. 

A speech from the poorest sort of people, which always indicates 
that the party vituperated is a gentleman. The very fact which 
they deny, is that which galls and exasperates them to use this * 
language. The forbearance with which it is usually received, is 
a proof what interpretation the bystander sets upon it. Of a 
kin to this, and still less politic, are the phrases with which, in 
this street rhetoric, they ply one another more grossly ; — He is a 

poor creature. — He has not a rag to cover fyc. ; though this 

last, we confess, is more frequently applied by females to females. 
They do not perceive that the satire glances upon themselves. A 
poor man, of all things in the world, should not upbraid an anta- 
gonist with poverty. Are there no other topics — as, to tell him 

his father was hanged — his sister, &c , without exposing a 

secret, which should be kept snug between them ; and doing an 
affront to the order to which they have the honor equally to be- 



336 ELIA. 



long ? All this while they do not see how the wealthier man 
stands by and laughs in his sleeve at both. 



THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH. 

A smooth text to the letter ; and, preached from the pulpit, is 
sure of a docile audience from the pews lined with satin. It is 
twice sitting upon velvet to a foolish squire to be told, that he — 
and not perverse nature, as the homilies would make us imagine, 
is the true cause of all the irregularities in his parish. This is 
striking at the root of free-will indeed, and denying the originality 
of sin in any sense. But men are not such implicit sheep as this 
comes to. If the abstinence from evil on the part of the upper 
classes is to derive itself from no higher principle than the appre- 
hension of setting ill patterns to the lower, we beg leave to dis- 
charge them from all squeamishness on that score : they may 
even take their fill of pleasures, where they can find them. The 
Genius of Poverty, hampered and straitened as it is, is not so bar- 
ren of invention, but it can trade upcn the staple of its own vice, 
without drawing upon their capital. The poor are not quite such 
servile imitators as they take them for. Some of them are very 
clever artists in their way. Here and there we find an original. 
Who taught the poor to steal, to pilfer ? They did not go to the 
great for schoolmasters in these faculties surely. It is well if in 
some vices they allow us to be — no copyists. In no other sense 
is it true that the poor copy them, than as servants may be said to 
take after their masters and mistresses, when they succeed to their 
reversionary cold meats. If the master, from indisposition or 
some other cause, neglect his food, the servant dines notwith- 
standing. 

" O, but (some will say) the force of example is great." We 
knew a lady who was so scrupulous on this head, that she would 
put up with the calls of the most impertinent visitor, rather than 
let her servant say she was not at home, for fear of teaching her 
maid to tell an untruth ; and this in the very face of the fact, 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 337 

which she knew well enough, that the wench was one of the 
greatest liars upon the earth without teaching ; so much so, that 
her mistress possibly never heard two words of consecutive truth 
from her in her life. But nature must go for nothing : example 
must be everything. This liar in grain, who never opened her 
mouth without a lie, must be guarded against a remote inference, 
which she (pretty casuist !) might possibly draw from a form of 
words --literally false, but essentially deceiving no one — that 
under some circumstances a fib might not be so exceedingly sin- 
ful — a fiction, too, not at all in her own way, or one that she 
could be suspected of adopting, for few servant- wenches care to 
be denied to visitors. 

This word example reminds us of another fine word which is 
in use upon these occasions — encouragement. " People in our 
sphere must not be thought to give encouragement to such pro- 
ceedings." To such a frantic height is this principle capable of 
being carried, that we have known individuals who have thought 
it within the scope of their influence to sanction despair, and give 
eclat to — suicide. A domestic in the family of a county member 
lately deceased, from love, or some unknown cause, cut his throat, 
but not successfully. The poor fellow was otherwise much loved 
and respected ; and great interest was used in his behalf, upon his 
recovery, that he might be permitted to retain his place ; his word 
being first pledged, not without some substantial sponsors to pro- 
mise for him, that the like should never happen again. His mas- 
ter was inclinable to keep him, but his mistress thought otherwise ; 
and John in the end was dismissed, her ladyship declaring that 
she " could not think of encouraging any such doings in the 
county." 



VI. 

THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST. 

Not a man, woman, or child, in ten miles round Guildhall, who 
really believes this saying. The inventor of it did not believe it 
himself. It was made in revenge by somebody, who was disap- 
23 

/ 



338 ELIA. 

pointed of a regale. It is a vile cold-scrag-of-mutton sophism ; a 
lie palmed upon the palate, which knows better things. If nothing 
else could be said for a feast, this is sufficient that from the su- 
perflux there is usually something left for the next day. Morally 
interpreted, it belongs to a class of proverbs which have a ten- 
dency to make us undervalue money. Of this cast are those no- 
table observations, that money is not health ; riches cannot pur- 
chase everything : the metaphor which makes gold to be mere 
muck, with the morality which traces fine clothing to the sheep's 
back, and denounces pearl as the unhandsome excretion of an 
oyster. Hence, too, the phrase which imputes dirt to acres — a 
sophistry so barefaced, that even the literal sense of it is true only 
in a wet season. This, and abundance of similar sage saws 
assuming to inculcate content, we verily believe to have been the 
invention of some cunning borrower, who had designs upon the 
purse of his wealthier neighbor, which he could only hope to 
carry by force of these verbal jugglings. Translate any one of 
these sayings out of the artful metonymy which envelopes it, and 
the trick is apparent. Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, ex- 
hilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing 
foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time 
to himself, are not muck — however we may be pleased to scanda- 
lize with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for 
us. 



VII. 

OF TWO DISPUTANTS THE WARMEST IS GENERALLY IN THE WRONG. 

Our experience would lead us to quite an opposite conclusion. 
Temper, indeed, is no test of truth ; but warmth and earnestness 
are a proof at least of a man's own conviction of the rectitude of 
that which he maintains. Coolness is as often the result of an 
unprincipled indifference to truth or falsehood, as of a sober con- 
fidence in a man's own side in a dispute. Nothing is more in- 
sulting sometimes than the appearance of this philosophic temper. 
There is little Titubus, the stammering law-stationer in Lincoln's 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 339 

Inn — we have seldom known this shrewd little fellow engaged in 
an argument where we were not convinced he had the best of it, 
if his tongue would but fairly have seconded him. When he has 
been spluttering excellent broken sense for an hour together, 
writhing and laboring to be delivered of the point of dispute — 
the very gist of the controversy knocking at his teeth, which like 
some obstinate iron-grating still obstructed its deliverance — his 
puny frame convulsed, and face reddening all over at an unfair- 
ness in the logic which he wanted articulation to expose, it has 
moved our gall to see a smooth portly fellow of an adversary, 
that cared not a button for the merits of the question, by merely 
laying his hand upon the head of the stationer, and desiring him 
to be calm (your tall disputants have always the advantage), with 
a provoking sneer carry the argument clean from him in the 
opinion of all the bystanders, who have gone away clearly con- 
vinced that Titubus must have been in the wrong, because he 

was in a passion ; and that Mr. , meaning his opponent, is 

one of the fairest and at the same time one of the most dispas- 
sionate arguers breathing. 



VIII. 



THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, BECAUSE THEY WILL 
NOT BEAR A TRANSLATION. 

The same might be said of the wittiest local allusions. A cus- 
tom is sometimes as difficult to explain to a foreigner as a pun. 
What would become of a great part of the wit of the last age, if 
it were tried by this test ? How would certain topics, as alder- 
manity, cuckoldry, have sounded to a Terentian auditory, though 
Terence himself had been alive to translate them 1 Senator urba- 
nus with Curruca to boot for a synonyme, would but faintly have 
done the business. Words involving nations, are hard enough to 
render ; it is too much to expect us to translate a sound, and give 
an excellent version to a jingle. The Virgilian harmony is not 
translated, but by substituting harmonious sounds in another Ian- 



340 ELIA. 

guage for it. To Latinise a pun, we must seek a pun in Latin, 
that will answer to it ; as, to give an idea of the double endings 
in Hudibras, we must have recourse to a similar practice in the 
old monkish doggrel. Dennis, the fiercest oppugner of puns in 
ancient or modern times, professes himself highly tickled with, the 
" a stick," chiming to " ecclesiastic." Yet what is this but a 
species of pun, a verbal consonance ? 



IX. 

THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST. 

If by worst be only meant the most farfetched and startling, we 
agree to it. A pun is not bounded by the laws which limit nicer 
wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear : not a feather to tickle the 
intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but 
comes bounding into the presence, and does not show the less 
comic for being dragged in sometimes by the head and shoulders. 
What though it limp a little, or prove defective in one leg ? — all 
the better. A pun may easily be too curious and artificial. Who 
has not at one time or other been at a party of professors (him- 
self perhaps an old offender in that line), where, after ringing a 
round of the most ingenious conceits, every man contributing his 
shot, and some there the most expert shooters of the day ; after 
making a poor word run the gauntlet till it is ready to drop ; 
after hunting and winding it through all the possible ambages of 
similar sounds ; after squeezing, and hauling, and tugging at it, 
till the very milk of it will not yield a drop further, — suddenly 
some obscure, unthought-of fellow in a corner, who was never 
'prentice to the trade, whom the company for very pity passed 
over, as we do by a known poor man when a money-subscription 
is going round, no one calling on him for his quota — has all at 
once come out with something so whimsical, yet so pertinent ; so 
brazen in its pretensions, yet so impossible to be denied ; so ex- 
quisitely good, and so deplorably bad, at the same time, — that it 
has proved a Robin Hood's shot ; anything ulterior to that is 
despaired of; and the party breaks up, unanimously voting 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 341 

it to be the very worst (that is, best) pun of the evening. This 
species of wit is the better for not being perfect in all its parts. 
What it gains in completeness, it loses in naturalness. The more 
exactly it satisfies the critical, the less hold it has upon some other 
facilities. The puns which are the most entertaining are those 
which will least bear an analysis. Of this kind is the following, 
recorded with a sort of stigma, in one of Swift's Miscellanies. 

An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare 
through the streets, accosts him with this extraordinary question : 

" Prithee, friend, is that thy own hare, or a wig ?" 

There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might 
blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a 
critic who should be laughter-proof. The quibble in itself is not 
considerable. It is only a new turn given by a little false pro- 
nunciation, to a very common, though not very courteous inquiry. 
Put by one gentleman to another at a dinner-party, it would have 
been vapid ; to the mistress of the house, it would have shown 
much less wit than rudeness. We must take in the totality of 
time, place, and person ; the pert look of the inquiring scholar, 
the desponding look of the puzzled porter : the one stopping at 
leisure, the other hurrying on with his burthen ; the innocent 
though rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, 
with the utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second ; the 
place — a public street, not favorable to frivolous investigations ; 
the affrontive quality of the primitive inquiry (the common ques- 
tion) invidiously transferred to the derivative (the new turn given 
to it) in the implied satire ; namely, that few of that tribe are 
expected to eat of the good things which they carry, they being 
in most countries considered rather as the temporary trustees 
than owners of such dainties, — which the fellow was beginning 
to understand ; but then the wig again comes in, and he can 
make nothing of it ; all put together constitute a picture : Ho- 
garth could have made it intelligible on canvas. 

Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very bad pun, 
because of the defectiveness in the concluding member, which is 
its very beauty, and constitutes the surprise. The same persons 
shall cry up for admirable the cold quibble from Virgil about the 



342 ELIA. 

broken Cremona* ; because it is made out in all its parts, and 
leaves nothing to the imagination. We venture to call it cold ; 
because, of thousands who have admired it, it would be difficult 
to find one who has heartily chuckled at it. As appealing to the 
judgment merely (setting the risible faculty aside), we must pro- 
nounce it a monument of curious felicity. But as some stories 
are said to be too good to be true, it may with equal truth be as- 
serted of this bi verbal allusion, that it is too good to be natural. 
One cannot help suspecting that the incident was invented to fit 
the line. It would have been better had it been less perfect. 
Like some Virgilian hemistichs, it has suffered by filling up. 
The nimium Vicina was enough in conscience ; the Cremona af- 
terwards loads it. It is in fact a double pun ; and we have 
always observed that a superfoetation in this sort of wit is dan- 
gerous. When a man has said a good thing, it is seldom politic 
to follow it up. We do not care to be cheated a second time ; or, 
perhaps, the mind of man (with reverence be it spoken) is not 
capacious enough to lodge two puns at a time. The impression, 
to be forcible, must be simultaneous and undivided. 



X. 

THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES. 

Those who use this proverb can never have seen Mrs. Conrady. 

The soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from the celes- 
tial beauty. As she partakes more or less of this heavenly light, 
she informs, with corresponding characters, the fleshly tenement 
which she chooses, and frames to herself a suitable mansion. 

All which only proves that the soul of Mrs. Conrady, in her 
pre-existent state, was no great judge of architecture. 

To the same effect in a Hymn in honor of Beauty, divine 
Spenser platinizing sings : — 



-Every spirit as it is more pure, 



And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
♦Swift. 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 343 

So it the fairer body doth procure 
To habit in, and it more fairly dight 
With cheerful grace and amiable sight, 
For of the soul the body form doth take : 
For soul is form and doth the body make." 

But Spenser it is clear never saw Mrs. Conrady. 

These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philosophy ; for 
here, in his very next stanza but one, is a saving clause, which 
throws us all out again, and leaves us as much to seek as ever : — 

" Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind 
Dwells in deformed tabernacle drown'd, 
Either by chance, against the course of kind, 
Or through unaptness in the substance found, 
Which it assumed of some stubborn ground, 
That will not yield unto her form's direction, 
But is performed with some foul imperfection." 

From which it would follow, that Spenser had seen somebody 
like Mrs. Conrady. 

The spirit of this good lady — her previous anima — must have 
stumbled upon one of these untoward tabernacles which he speaks 
of. A more rebellious commodity of clay for a ground, as the 
poet calls it, no gentle mind — and sure hers is one of the gentlest 
— ever had to deal with. 

Pondering upon her inexplicable visage — inexplicable, we 
mean, but by this modification of the theory — -we have come to a 
conclusion that, if one must be plain, it is better to be plain all 
over than amidst a tolerable residue of features, to hang out one 
that shall be exceptionable. No one can say of Mrs. Conrady 's 
countenance that it would be better if she had but a nose. It is 
impossible to pull her to pieces in this manner. We have seen 
the most malicious beauties of her own sex baffled in the attempt 
at a selection. The tout-ensemble defies particularizing. It is too 
complete — too consistent, as we may say — to admit of these in- 
vidious reservations. It is not as if some Apelles had picked out 
here a lip— and there a chin — out of the collected ugliness of 
Greece, to frame a mode by. It is a symmetrical whole. We 
challenge the minutest connoisseur to cavil at any part or parcel 



314 ELI A. 

of the countenance in question ; to say that this, or that, is im- 
properly placed. We are convinced that true ugliness, no less 
than is affirmed of true beauty, is the result of harmony. Like 
that too it reigns without a competitor. No one ever saw Mrs. 
Conrady, without pronouncing her to be the plainest woman that 
he ever met with in the course of his life. The first time that 
you are indulged with a sight of her face, is an era in your exist- 
ence ever after. You are glad to have seen it — like Stonehenge. 
No one can pretend to forget it. No one ever apologised to her 
for meeting her in the street on such a day and not knowing her : 
the pretext would be too bare. Nobody can mistake her for ano- 
ther. Nobody can say of her, " I think I have seen that face 
somewhere, but I cannot call to mind where." You must remem- 
ber that in such a parlor it first struck you — like a bust. You 
wondered where the owner of the house had picked it up. You, 
wondered more when it began to move its lips — so mildly too ! 
No one ever thought of asking her to sit for her picture. Lock- 
ets are for remembrance ; and it would be clearly superfluous to 
hang an image at your heart, which once seen, can never be out 
of it. It is not a mean face either ; its entire originality pre- 
cludes that. Neither is it of that order of plain faces which im- 
prove upon acquaintance. Some very good but ordinary people, 
by an unwearied perseverance in good offices, put a cheat upon 
our eyes ; juggle our senses out of their natural impressions; and 
set us upon discovering good indications in a countenance, which at 
first sight promised nothing less. We detect gentleness, which had 
escaped us, lurking about an under lip. But when Mrs. Conrady 
has done you a service, her face remains the same ; when she has 
done you a thousand, and you know that she is ready to double 
the number, still it is that individual face. Neither can you say 
of it, that it would be a good face if it were not marked by the 
small-pox — a compliment which is always more admissive than 
excusatory — for either Mrs. Conrady never had the small-pox : 
or, as we say, took it kindly. No, it stands upon its own merits 
fairly. There it is. It is her mark, her token ; that which she 
is known by. * 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 345 

XI. 

THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE N THE MOUTH. 

Nor a lady's age in the parish register. We hope we have more 
delicacy than to do either ; but some faces spare us the trouble of 
these dental inquiries. And what if the beast, which my friend 
would force upon my acceptance, prove, upon the face of it, a 
sorry Rosinante, a lean, ill-favored jade, whom no gentleman 
could think of setting up in his stables ? Must I, rather than not 
be obliged to my friend, make her a companion to Eclipse or 
Lightfoot ? A horse-giver, no more than a horse-seller, has a 
right to palm his spavined article upon us for good ware. An 
equivalent is expected in either case ; and, with my own good 
will, I would no more be cheated out of my thanks than out of 
my money. Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts 
of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude.. We 
thank them for nothing. Our friend Mitis carries this humor of 
never refusing a present, to the very point of absurdity — if it were 
possible to couple the ridiculous with so much mistaken delicacy, 
and real good-nature. Not an apartment in his fine house (and 
he has a true taste in household decorations), but is stuffed up with 
some preposterous print or mirror — the worst adapted to his 
panels that may be — -the presents of his friends that know his 
weakness ; while his noble Vandykes are displaced to make room 
for a set of daubs, the work of some wretched artist of his ac- 
quaintance, who, having had them returned upon his hands for 
bad likenesses, finds his account in bestowing them here gratis. 
The good creature has not the heart to mortify the painter at the 
expense of an honest refusal. It is pleasant (if it did not vex one 
at the same time) to see him sitting in his dining parlor, surround- 
ed with obscure aunts and cousins to God knows whom, while the 
true Lady Marys and Lady Bettys of his own honorable family, 
in favor to these adopted frights, are consigned to the stair-case 
and the lumber-room. In like manner his goodly shelves are one 
by one stripped of his favorite old authors, to give place to a col- 
lection of presentation copies — the flour and bran of modern poe- 
try. A presentation copy, reader, — if haply you are yet innocent 



346 ELIA. 

of such favors — is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you 
by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it ; 
for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship ; if a 
brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does 
sell, in return. We can speak to experience, having by us a tole- 
rable assortment of these gift- horses. Not to ride a metaphor to 
death — we are willing to acknowledge, that in some gifts there is 
sense. A duplicate out of a friend's library (where he has more 
than one copy of a rare author) is intelligible. There are favors, 
short of the pecuniary — a thing not fit to be hinted at among gen- 
tlemen — which confer as much grace upon the acceptor as the 
offerer ; the kind, we confess, which is most to our palate, is of 
those little conciliatory missives, which for their vehicle generally 
choose a hamper — little odd presents of game, fruit, perhaps wine 
— though it is essential to the delicacy of the latter, that it be 
home-made. We love to have our friend in the country sitting 
thus at our table by proxy ; to apprehend his presence (though a 
hundred miles may be between us) by a turkey^vhose goodly 
aspect reflects to us his " plump corpusculum ;" to taste him in 
grouse or woodcock : to feel him gliding down in the toast pecu- 
liar to the latter ; to concorporate him in a slice of Canterbury 
brawn. This is indeed to have him with ourselves ; to know him 
intimately ; such participation is methinks unitive, as the old theo- 
logians phrase it. For these considerations we should be sorry 
if certain restrictive regulations, which are thought to bear hard 
upon the peasantry of this . county, were entirely done away 
with. A hare, as the law now stands, makes many friends. 
Caius conciliates Titius (knowing his gout) with a leash of par- 
tridges. Titius (suspecting his partiality for them) passes them 
to Lucius ; who in his turn, preferring his friend's relish to his 
own, makes them over to Marcius ; till in their ever widening 
progress, and round of unconscious circum'-migration, they distri- 
bute the seeds of harmony over half the parish. We are well dis- 
posed to this kind of sensible remembrances ; and are the less 
apt to be taken by those little airy tokens — impalpable to the pal- 
ate — which, under the name of rings, lockets, keep-sakes, amuse 
some people's fancy mightily. We could never away with these 
indigestible trifles. They are the very kickshaws and foppery of 
friendship. 



POPULAR FALLACIES 347 

XII. 

THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY. 

Homes there are, we are sure, that are no homes ; the home of 
the very poor man, and another which we shall speak to presently. 
Crowded places of cheap entertainment, and the benches of ale- 
houses, if they could speak, might bear mournful testimony to the 
first. To them the very poor man resorts for an image of the 
home which he cannot find at home. For a starved grate, and a 
scanty firing, that is not enough to keep alive the natural heat in 
the fingers of so many shivering children with their mother, he 
finds in the depths of winter always a blazing hearth, and a hob 
to warm his pittance of beer by. Instead of the clamors of a wife, 
made gaunt by famishing, he meets with a cheerful attendance 
beyond the merits of the trifle which he can afford to spend. He 
has companions which his home denies him, for the very poor man 
has no visitors. He can look into the goings on of the world, and 
speak a little to politics. At home there are no politics stirring, 
but the domestic. All interests, real or imaginary, all topics that 
should expand the mind of man, and connect him to a sympathy 
with general existence, are crushed in the absorbing considera- 
tion of food to be obtained for the family. Beyond the price of 
bread, news is senseless and impertinent. At home there is no 
larder. Here there is at least a show of plenty ; and while he 
cooks his lean scrap of butchers' meat before the common bars, or 
munches his humbler cold viands, his relishing bread and cheese 
with an onion, in a corner, where no one reflects upon his pover- 
ty, he has a sight of the substantial joint providing for the land- 
lord and his family. He takes an interest in the dressing of it ; 
and while he assists in removing the trivet from the fire, he feels 
that there is such a thing as beef and cabbage, which he was be- 
ginning to forget at home. All this while he deserts his wife and 
children. But what wife and what children ? Prosperous men, 
who object to this desertion, image to themselves some clean con- 
tented family like that which they go home to. But look at the 
countenance of the poor wives who follow and persecute their 
good-man to the door of the public-house, which he is about to 



348 ELIA. 

enter, when something like shame would restrain him, if stronger 
misery did not induce him to pass the threshold. That face, ground 
by want, in which every cheerful, every conversable lineament 
has been long effaced by misery, — is that a face to stay at home 
with ? is it more a woman, or a wild cat ? alas ! it is the face of 
the wife of his youth, that once smiled upon him. It can smile 
no longer. What comforts can it share ? what burdens can it 
lighten ? Oh, 'tis a fine thing to talk of the humble meal shared 
together ! But what if there be no bread in the cupboard 1 The 
innocent prattle of his children takes out the sting of a man's 
poverty. But the children of the very poor do not prattle. It is 
none of the least frightful features in that condition, that there is 
no childishness in its dwellings. Poor people, said a sensible old 
nurse to us once, do not bring up their children ; they drag them 
up. The little careless darling of the wealthier nursery, in their 
hovel, is transformed betimes into a premature reflecting person. 
No one has time to dandle it, no one thinks it worth while to coax 
it, to soothe it, to toss it up and down, to humor it. There is none 
to kiss away its tears. If it cries, it can only be beaten. It has 
been prettily said, that " a babe is fed with milk and praise." But 
the aliment of this poor babe was thin, unnourishing ; the return 
to its little baby-tricks, and efforts to engage attention, bitter cease- 
less objurgation. It never had a toy, or knew what a coral 
meant. It grew up without the lullaby of nurses, it was a 
stranger to the patient fondle, the hushing caress, the attracting 
novelty, the costlier plaything, or the cheaper off-hand contrivance 
to divert the child ; the prattled nonsense (best sense to it), the 
wise impertinences, the wholesome lies, the apt story interposed, 
that puts a stop to present sufferings, and awakens the passions of 
young wonder. It was never sung to — no one ever told to it a tale 
of the nursery. It was dragged up, to live or to die as it happened. 
It had no young dreams. It broke at once into the iron realities 
of life. A child exists not for the very poor as any object of dal- 
liance ; it is only another mouth to be fed, a pair of little hands 
to be betimes inured to labor. It is the rival, till it can be the 
co-operator, for food with the parent. It is never his mirth, his 
diversion, his solace : it never makes him young again, with re- 
calling his young times. The children of the very poor have 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 349 

no young times. It makes the very heart bleed to overhear the 
casual street-talk between a poor woman and her little girl, a wo- 
man of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the 
squalid beings which we have been contemplating. It is not of 
toys, of nursery books, of summer holidays (fitting that age) ; of 
the promised sight or play ; of praised sufficiency at school. It 
is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of 
potatoes. The questions of the child, that should be the very 
outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and 
melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman, — before it 
was a child. It has learned to go to market ; it chaffers, it hag- 
gles, it envies, it murmurs ; it is knowing, acute, sharpened ; it 
never prattles. Had we not reason to say, that the* home of the 
very poor is no home ? 

There is yet another home, which we are constrained to deny 
to be one. It has a larder, which the home of the poor man wants ; 
its fireside conveniences, of which the poor dream not. But with 
all this, it is no home. It is — the house of the man that is infested 
with many visitors. May we be branded for the veriest churl, if 
we deny our heart to the many noble-hearted friends that at 
times exchange their dwellings for our poor roof! It is not of 
guests that we complain, but of endless, purposeless visitants ; 
droppers in, as they are called. We sometimes wonder from what 
sky they fall. It is the very error of the position of our lodging ; 
its horoscopy was ill-calculated, being just situate in a medium — 
a plaguy suburban mid-space — fitted to catch idlers from town or 
country. We are older than we were, and age is easily put out of 
its way. We have fewer sands in our glass to reckon upon, and 
we cannot brook to see them drop in endlessly succeeding imper- 
tinences. At our time of life, to be alone sometimes is as needful 
as sleep. It is the refreshing sleep of the day. The growing in- 
firmities of age manifest themselves in nothing more strongly, than 
in an inveterate dislike of interruption. The thing which we are 
doing, we wish to be permitted to do. We have neither much 
knowledge nor devices ; but there are fewer in the place to which 
we hasten. We are not willingly put out of our way, even at a 
game of nine-pins. While youth was, we had vast reversions in 
time future ; we are reduced to a present pittance, and obliged to 



350 ELIA. 

economise in that article. We bleed away our moments now as 
hardly as our ducats. We cannot bear to have our thin ward- 
robe eaten and fretted into by moths. We are willing to barter 
our good time with a friend, who gives us in exchange his own. 
Herein is the distinction between the genuine guest and the visit- 
ant. This latter takes your good time, and gives you his bad in 
exchange. The guest is domestic to you as your good cat, or 
household bird ; the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at your win- 
dow, and out again, leaving nothing but a sense of disturbance, 
and victuals spoiled. The inferior functions of life begin to move 
heavily. We cannot concoct our food with interruptions. Our 
chief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. With difficulty we 
can eat before a guest ; and never understood what the relish of 
public feasting meant. Meats have no savor, nor digestion fair 
play, in a crowd. The unexpected coming-in of a visitant stops 
the machine. There is a punctual generation who time their calls 
to the precise commencement of your dining-hour — not to eat — 
but to see you eat. Our knife and fork drop instinctively, and we 
feel that we have swallowed our latest morsel. Others again 
show their genius, as we have said, in knocking the moment you 
have just sat down to a book. They have a peculiar compassion- 
ate sneer, with which they " hope that they do not interrupt your 
studies." Though they flutter off the next moment, to carry their 
impertinences to the nearest student that they can call their friend, 
the tone of the book is spoiled ; we shut the leaves, and, with 
, v Dante's lovers, read no more that day. It were well if the effect 
of intrusion were simply co-extensive with its presence ; but it 
mars all the good hours afterwards. These scratches in appear- 
ance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. " It is a prostitution 
of the bravery of friendship," says worthy Bishop Taylor, " to 
spend it upon impertinent people, who are, it may be, loads to 
their families, but can never ease my loads." This is the secret 
of their gaddings, their visits, and morning calls. They too have 
homes, which are — no homes. 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 351 

XIII. 

THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME AND LOVE MY DOG. 

a Good sir, or madam — as it may be — we most willingly embrace 
the offer of your friendship. We have long known your excellent 
qualities. We have wished to have you nearer to us ; to hold 
you within the^very innermost fold of our heart. We can have 
no reserve towards a person of your open and noble nature. The 
frankness of your humor suits us exactly. We have been long 
looking for such a friend. Quick — let us disburthen our troubles 
into each other's bosoms — let us make our single joys shine by 
reduplication — But yap, yap, yap ! what is this confounded cur ? 
he has fastened his tooth, which is none of the bluntest, just in the 
fleshy part of my leg." 

" It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my sake. Here, 
Test— Test— Test !" 

"But he has bitten me." 

" Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better acquainted with 
him. I have had him three years. He never bites me." 

Yap, yap, yap ! — " He is at it again." 

" Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not like to be 
kicked. I expect my dog to be treated with all the respect due 
to myself." 

" But do you always take him out with you, when you go a 
friendship-hunting ?" 

"Invariably. *Tis the sweetest, prettiest, best-conditioned 
animal. I call him my test — the touchstone by which to try a 
friend. No one can properly be said to love me, who does not 
love him." 

" Excuse us, dear sir — or madam, aforesaid- — if upon further 
consideration we are obliged to decline the otherwise invaluable 
offer of your friendship. We do not like dogs." 

" Mighty well, sir — you know the conditions — you may have 
worse offers. Come along, Test" 

The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but that, in the inter- 
course of life, we have had frequent occasions of breaking off an 
agreeable intimacy by reason of these canine appendages. They 



352 ELIA. 

do not always come in the shape of dogs ; they sometimes wear 
the more plausible and human character of kinsfolk, near ac- 
quaintances, my friend's friend, his partner, his wife, or his 
children. We could never yet form a friendship — not to speak 
of more delicate correspondence — however much to our iaste, 
without the intervention of some third anomaly, some impertinent 
clog affixed to the relation — the understood dog in the proverb. 
The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us 
with a mixture ; like a school-boy's holiday, with a task affixed 
to the tail of it. What a delightful companion is * * * *, if he 
did not always bring his tall cousin with him ! He seems to grow 
with him \ like some of those double births which we remember to 
have read of with such wonder and delight in the old " Athenian 
Oracle," where Swift commenced author by writing Pindaric 
Odes (what a beginning for him !) upon Sir William Temple. 
There is the picture of the brother, with the little brother peeping 
out at his shoulder ; a species of fraternity, which we have no 
name of kin close enough to comprehend. When * * * * comes, 
poking in his head and shoulder into your room, as if to feel his 
entry, you think, surely you have now got him to yourself — what 
a three hours' chat we shall have ? — but ever in the haunch of 
him, and before his diffident body is well disclosed in your apart- 
ment, appears the haunting shadow of the cousin, over-peering his 
modest kinsman, and sure to overlay the expected good talk with 
his insufferable procerity of stature, and uncorresponding dwarfish- 
ness of observation. Misfortunes seldom come alone. 'Tis hard 
when a blessing comes accompanied. Cannot we like Sempro- 
nia, without sitting down to chess with her eternal brother ? or 
know Sulpicia, without knowing all the round of her card-playing 
relations ? — must my friend's brethren of necessity be mine also ? 
must we be hand and glove with Dick Selby the parson, or Jack 
Selby the calico-printer, because W. S.. who is neither, but a 
ripe wit and a critic, has the misfortune to claim a common 
parentage with them ? Let him lay down his brothers ; and 'tis 
odds but we will cast him in a pair of ours (we have a superflux) 
to balance the concession. Let F. H. lay down his garrulous 
uncle ; and Honorius dismiss his vapid wife, and superfluous 
establishment of six boys : things between boy and manhood — too 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 353 

ripe for play, too raw for conversation — that come in, impudently 
staring their father's old friend out of countenance; and will 
neither aid, nor let alone, the conference ; that we may once more 
meet upon equal terms, as we were wont to do in the disengaged 
state of bachelorhood. 

It is well if your friend or mistress he content with these cani- 
cular probations. Few young ladies but in this sense keep a dog. 
But when Rutilia hounds at you her tiger aunt ; or Respina expects 
you to cherish and fondle her viper sister, whom she has prepos- 
terously taken into her bosom, to try stinging conclusions upon 
your constancy ; they must not complain if the house be rather 
thin of suitors. Scylla must have broken off many excellent 
matches in her time, if she insisted upon all that loved her, loving 
her dogs also. 

An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, of Delia 
Cruscan memory. In tender youth he loved and courted a 
modest appanage to the Opera, — in truth a dancer, — who had won 
him by the artless contrast between her manners and situation. 
She seemed to him a native violet, that had been transplanted by 
some rude accident into that exotic and artificial hotbed. Nor, in 
truth, was she less genuine and sincere than she appeared to him. 
He wooed and won his flower. Only for appearance' sake, and 
for due honor to the bride's relations, she craved that she might 
have the attendance of her friends and kindred at the approaching 
solemnity. The request was too amiable not to be conceded : and 
in this solicitude for conciliating the good- will of mere relations, 
he found a presage of her superior attentions to himself, when the 
golden shaft should have " killed the flock of all affections else." 
The morning came : and at the Star and Garter, Richmond — the 
place appointed for the breakfasting — accompanied with one 
English friend, he impatiently awaited what reinforcements the 
bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich muster she had 
made. They came in six coaches — the whole corps du ballet — 
French, Italian, men and women. Monsieur de B., the famous 
piroueiter of the day, led his fair spouse, but craggy, from the 
banks of the Seine. The Prima Donna had sent her excuse. 
But the first and second BufFa were there ; and Signor Sc — , and 
Signora Ch — , and Madame V — t with a countless cavalcade 
24 



354 ELIA. 

besides of chorusers, figurantes ! at the sight of whom Merry 
afterwards declared, that " then for the first time it struck him 
seriously, that he was about to marry — a dancer." But there 
was no help for it. Besides, it was her day ; these were, in fact, 
her friends and kinsfolk. The assemblage, though whimsical, 
was all very natural. But when the bride— handing out of the last 
coach a still more extraordinary figure than the rest — presented 
to him as her father — the gentleman that was to give her away — ■ 
no less a person than Signor Delpini himself — with a sort of pride, 
as much as to say, See what I have brought to do us honor ! — the 
thought of so extraordinary a paternity quite overcame him ; and 
slipping away under some pretence from the bride and her mot- 
ley adherents, poor Merry took horse from the backyard to the 
nearest sea-coast, from which, shipping himself to America, he 
shortly afterwards consoled himself with a more congenial match 
in the person of Miss Brunton ; relieved from his intended clown 
father, and a bevy of painted buffas for bridemaids. 



XIV. 

THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK. 

At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night 
gear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are 
not naturalists enough to determine. But for a mere human gen- 
tleman — that has no orchestra business to call him from his warm 
bed to such preposterous exercises — we take ten, or half after ten 
(eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very 
earliest hour at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. 
To think of it, we say ; for to do it in earnest requires another half 
hour's good consideration. Not but there ^are pretty sun-risings, 
as we are told, and such like gawds, abroad in the world, in 
summer-time especially, some hours before what we have assigned; 
which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getting up. 
But having been tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assist at 
those ceremonies, we confess our quriosity abated. We are no 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 355 

longer ambitious of being the sun's courtiers, to attend at his 
morning levees. We hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred 
to waste them upon such observances ; which have in them, 
besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never 
anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called), 
to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we 
suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and head- 
aches ; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our pre- 
sumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the 
measures of that celestial and sleepless traveller. We deny not 
that there is something sprightly and vigorous at the outset espe- 
cially, in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the 
start of a lazy world ; to conquer death by proxy in his image. 
But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us ; and we pay 
usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty of the 
unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind 
are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their 
occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale ; 
we choose to linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the very 
time to recombine the wandering images, which night in a con- 
fused mass presented ; to snatch them from forgetfulness ; to shape 
and mould them. Some people have no good of their dreams. 
Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them curi- 
ously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision ; to collect 
the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with 
firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies ; to drag into day- 
light a struggling and half- vanishing night-mare ; to handle and 
examine his terrors, or the airy solaces. We have too much 
respect for these spiritual communications, to let them go so lightly. 
We are not so stupid, or so careless as that Imperial forgetter of 
his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the form 
of them. They seem to us to have as much significance as our 
waking concerns : or rather to import us more nearly, as more 
nearly we approach by years to the shadowy world, whither we 
are hastening. We have shaken hands with the world's business ; 
we have done with it ; we have discharged ourself of it. Why 
should we get up ? we have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to 
manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act. Wo 



356 ELIA 

have nothing here to expect, but in a short time a sick bed, and a 
dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as 
niglrfc affords. We are already half acquainted with ghosts. We 
were never much in the world. Disappointment early struck a 
dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits 
showed grey before our hairs. The mighty changes of the 
world already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas 
are composed. We have asked no more of life than what the 
mimic images in play-houses present us with. Even those types 
have waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We 
are superannuated. In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, 
we contract politic alliances with shadows. It is good to have 
friends at court. The abstracted media of dreams seem no ill 
introduction to that spiritual presence, upon which, in no long 
time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little 
of the usages of that colony ; to learn the language, and the 
faces we shall meet with ^here, that we may be the less awk- 
ward at our first coming among them. We willingly call a 
phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark 
companionship. Therefore, we cherish dreams. We try to 
spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world ; and think we 
know already, how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, 
which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted us, have 
become familiar. We feel attenuated into their meagre essences, 
and have given the hand a half-way approach to incorporal being. 
We once thought life to be something ; but it has unaccountably 
fallen from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with 
visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why 
should we get up ? 



XV. 

THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB. 

We could ney.er quite understand the philosophy of this arrange- 
ment, or the wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for instruction 
to these woolly bedfellows. A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 357 

to do but to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he can. Man found 
out long sixes, — Hail, candle-light ! without disparagement to sun 
or moon, the kindliest luminary of the three — if we may not 
rather style thee the irradiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon ! — 
We love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by candle-light. 
They are everybody's sun and moon. This is our peculiar and 
household planet. Wanting it, what savage unsocial nights 
must our ancestors have spent, wintering in caves and unillu- 
mined fastnesses ! They must have lain about and grumbled at 
one another in the dark. What repartees could have passed, 
when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neigh- 
bor's cheek to be sure that he understood it ? This accounts for 
the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast (try 
Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unlantern'd 
nights. Jokes came in with candles. We wonder how they 
saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How did they sup ? what 
a melange of chance carving they must have made it ! — here one 
had got the leg of a goat, when he wanted a horse's shoulder — 
there another had dipped his scooped palm in a kid-skin of wild 
honey, when he meditated right mare's milk. There is neither 
good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these civilized 
times, has never experienced this, when at some economic table 
he has commenced dining after dusk, and waited for the flavor 
till the lights came ? The senses can absolutely give and take 
reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal in the dark ? or dis- 
tinguish Sherris from pure Malaga ? Take away the candle 
from the smoking man ; by the glimmering of the left ashes, he 
knows that he is still smoking, but he knows it only by an infe- 
rence ; till the restored light, coming in aid of the olfactories, 
reveals to both senses the full aroma. Then how he redoubles 
his puffs ! how he burnishes ! — There is absolutely no such thing 
as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a 
book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbors ; but it was 
labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about, 
you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquettes, that will have 
you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By 
the midnight taper, the writer digests his meditations. By the 
same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch 



358 ELIA 

the flame, the odor. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the 
influential Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the 
sun's light. They are abstracted works — 

" Things that were born, when none but the still night, 
And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes." 

Marry, daylight — daylight might furnish the images, the crude 
material ; but for the fine shapings, the true turning and filing 
(as mine author hath it), they must be content to hold their inspi- 
ration of the candle. The mild internal light, that reveals them, 
like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sun-shine. 
Night and silence call out the starry fancies. Milton's Morning 
Hymn in Paradise, we would hold a good wager, was penned at 
midnight ; and Taylor's rich description of a sun-rise smells de- 
cidedly of the taper. Even ourself, in these our humbler lucubra- 
tions, tune our best-measured cadences (Prose has her cadences) 
not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman, " bless- 
ing the doors ;" or the wild sweep of winds at midnight. Even 
now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted, courts our 
endeavors. We would indite something about the Solar System. 
Betty, bring the candles. 



XVL 

THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE. 

We grant that it is, and a very serious one — to a man's friends, 
and to all that have to do with him; but whether the condition 
of the man himself is so much to be deplored may admit of a 
question. We can speak a little to it, being ourself but lately 
recovered — we whisper it in confidence, reader — out of a long 
and desperate fit of the sullens. Was the cure a blessing ? The 
conviction which wrought it, came too clearly to leave a scruple 
of the fanciful injuries — for they were mere fancies — which had 
provoked the humor. But the humor itself was too self-pleasing, 
while it lasted — we know how bare we lay ourself in the con- 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 359 

i — to be abandoned all at once with the grounds of it. We 
btill brood o^er wrongs which we know to have been imaginary ; 

and for our old acquaintance N , whom we find to have been 

a truer friend than we took him for, we substitute some phantom 
— a Caius or a Titius — as like him as we dare to form it, to 
wreak our yet unsatisfied resentments on. It is mortifying to 
fall at once from the pinnacle of neglect ; to forego the idea of 
having been ill-used and contumaciously treated, by an old friend. 
The first thing to aggrandize a man in his own conceit, is to con- 
ceive of himself as neglected. There let him fix if he can. 
To undeceive him is to deprive him of the most tickling morsel 
within the range of self-complacency. No flattery can come 
near it. Happy is he who suspects his friend of an injustice ; 
but supremely blest, who thinks all his friends in a conspiracy to 
depress and undervalue him. There is a pleasure (we sing not 
to the profane) far beyond the reach of all that the world counts 
joy — a deep, enduring satisfaction in the depths, where the super- 
ficial seek it not, of discontent. Were we to recite one half of 
this mystery, — which we were let into by our late dissatisfaction, 
all the world would be in love with disrespect ; we should wear 
a slight for a bracelet, and neglects and contumacies would be 
the only matter for courtship. Unlike to that mysterious book 
in the Apocalypse, the study of this mystery is unpalatable only 
in the commencement. The first sting of a suspicion is grievous ; 
but wait — out of that wound, which to flesh and blood seemed 
so difficult, there is balm and honey to be extracted. Your 
friend passed you on such or such a day, — having in his company 
one that you conceived worse than ambiguously disposed towards 
you, — passed you in the street without notice. To be sure he is 
something short-sighted ; and it was in your power to have ac- 
costed Mm. But facts and sane inferences are trifles to a true 
adept in the science of dissatisfaction. He must have seen you ; 

and S , who was with him, must have been the cause of the 

contempt. It galls you, and well it may. But have patience. 
Go home, and make the worst of it, and you are a made man for 
this time. Shut yourself up, and — rejecting, as an enemy to 
your peace, every whispering suggestion that but insinuates there 
may be a mistake — reflect seriously upon the many lesser in- 



360 ' ELIA. 

stances which you had begun to perceive, in proof of your friend's 
disaffection towards you. None of them singly was much to the 
purpose, but the aggregate weight is positive ; and you have this 
last affront to clench them. Thus far the process is anything but 
agreeable. But now to your relief comes in the comparative 
faculty. You conjure up all the kind feelings you have had for 
your friend \ what you have been to him, and what you would 
have been to him, if he would have suffered you ; how you de- 
fended him in this or that place ; and his good name — his literary- 
reputation, and so forth, was always dearer to you than your 
own ! Your heart, spite of itself, yearns towards him. You 
could weep tears of blood but for a restraining pride. How say 
you ! do you not yet begin to apprehend a comfort ? some alloy of 
sweetness in the bitter waters ? Stop not here, nor penuriously 
cheat yourself of your reversions. You are on vantage ground. 
Enlarge your speculations, and take in the rest of your friends, 
as a spark kindles more sparks. Was there one among them, 
who has not to you proved hollow, false, slippery as water ? Be- 
gin to think that the relation itself is inconsistent with mortality. 
That the very idea of friendship, with its component parts, as 
honor, fidelity, steadiness, exists but in your single bosom. 
Image yourself to yourself, as the only possible friend in a world 
incapable of that communion. Now the gloom thickens. The 
little star of self-love twinkles, that is to encourage you through 
deeper glooms than this. You are not yet at the half point of 
your elevation. You are not yet, believe me, half sulky enough. 
Adverting to the world in general (as these circles in the mind 
will spread to infinity), reflect with what strange injustice you 
have been treated in quarters where (setting gratitude and the 
expectation of friendly returns aside as chimeras) you pretended 
no claim beyond justice, the naked due of all men. Think the 
very idea of right and fit fled from the earth, or your breast the 
solitary receptacle of it, till you have swelled yourself into at 
least one hemisphere ; the other being the vast Arabia Stony of 
your friends and the world aforesaid. To grow bigger every 
moment in your own conceit, and the world to lessen ; to deify 
yourself at the expense of your species ; to judge the world — this 
is the acme and supreme point of your mystery — these the true 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 361 

Pleasures of Sulkiness, We profess no more of this grand 
secret than what ourself experimented on one rainy afternoon in 
the last week, sulking in our study. We had proceeded to the 
penultimate . point, at which the true adept seldom stops, where 
the consideration of benefit forgot is about to merge in the medi- 
tation of general injustice — when a knock at the door was followed 
by the entrance of the very friend whose not seeing of us in the 
morning (for we will now confess the case our own), an acci- 
dental oversight, had given rise to so much agreeable generaliza- 
tion ! To mortify us still more, and take down the whole flatter- 
ing superstructure which pride had piled upon neglect, he had 

brought in his hand the identical S , in whose favor we had 

suspected him of the contumacy. Asseverations were needless, 
where the frank manner of them both was convictive of the inju- 
rious nature of the suspicion. We fancied that they perceived 
our embarrassment ; but were too proud, or something else, to 
confess to the secret of it. We had been but too lately in the 
condition of the noble patient in Argos :— 

Qui se credebat miros audire tragcedos, 
In vacuo leetus sessor plausorque theatre- — 

and could have exclaimed with equal reason against the friendly 
hands that cured us — 

Pol, me occidistis, amici, 
Non servastis, ait ; cui sic extorta voluptas, 
Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error. 



THE END. 






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